No One Writes to the Colonel

This was one of the texts, studied during my first year at university, back in 2003, though originally in Spanish. All these years later, I thought it high time to sit down and properly read one of the texts I was supposed to study in depth at university, though now without the socio-political and historical context to go with it.

The story's protagonists are The Colonel and his wife, who live in a small town in Colombia, possibly in the same time period as characters such as Aureliano Buendía, who appears in García Márquez's “100 Years of Solitude”.

The story tells us of the misery and desperation they face on a daily basis, whilst the Colonel awaits his long awaited war pension, which never seems to arrive, and money the couple could make from their dead son's fighting cockerel and it's sale.

We spend most of our time spent in limbo, pondering - Is the Colonel's pension ever going to arrive? Will the fighting cockerel ever win a fight? Will life ever get better for the couple?

There's no chapter structure in the traditional sense of a novel and at times, I also found the lack of names annoying as well, and to me, these are what frustrated me more than anything else.

I may read it again in the future, but for the minute, I'm left with a sense of relief that I've finished it and can move onto something else.