Gabophiles

No One Writes to the Colonel (Spanish: El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) is a novella written by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. It also gives its name to a short story collection. García Márquez considered it his best book, saying that he had to write One Hundred Years of Solitude so that people would read No One Writes to the Colonel. The novel, written between 1956 and 1957 while living in Paris in the Hotel des Trois Colleges [2] and first published in 1961,[3] is the story of an impoverished, retired colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, who still hopes to receive the pension he was promised some fifteen years earlier. The colonel lives with his asthmatic wife in a small village under martial law. The action opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician whose death is notable because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. The novel is set during the years of "La Violencia" in Colombia, when martial law and censorship prevail.