booklit

Gabriel García Márquez is one of those authors who I seem to acquire the titles of without actually reading them, partly because I found his most recent release, Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, despite its brevity, to be a rather dull and unmemorable read. Last year, however, I enjoyed his early non-fiction piece The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor enough not to write him off.  

So, feeling that I should at least make a dent in my Márquez collection, I scanned my shelves, passing over his longer novels - and better known - novels, eventually plumping for brevity once more and read No One Writes To The Colonel (1961), which, at sixty-nine pages, could really have been bundled with some other short stories, if only to justify its £7.99 price tag. In the US, at least, it was released as the lead in a short story collection.

In a small town in Colombia the titular colonel and his asthmatic wife are living day to day as best they can, selling off their possessions and whatever else they can in order to buy food and medicine. Every week the colonel heads to the post office in the hope that there will be a letter for him, bringing the pension that he is owed. But he’s been waiting for over a decade and no letter has ever arrived, or looks likely to, but he stumbles on with optimism:

The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‘We’ve waited long enough,’ his wife told him that night. ‘One must have the patience of an ox, as you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years.’ The colonel got into his hammock to read the newspapers.

‘We have to wait our turn,’ he said. ‘Our number is 1823.’

‘Since we’ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,’ his wife replied.

Aside from the pension, what gives the colonel hope is a rooster, the last possession the couple have of their son, “shot down nine months before at the cockfights for distributing clandestine literature”. While it’s a nuisance now, being only another mouth to feed, it’s only a few months until the fighting season resumes and the colonel, his optimism never waning, expects it to turn a profit, therefore, in the short run, it’s life becomes more important than his own:

Exhausted, his bones aching from sleeplessness, he couldn’t attend to his needs and the rooster’s at the same time. In the secong half of November, he thought that the animal would die after two days without corn. Then he remembered a handful of beans which he had hung in the chimney in July. He opened the pods and put down a can of dry seeds for the rooster.

No One Writes To The Colonel follows the weeks from October to January as the drudgery of everyday life under military rule drives the characters to the brink of starvation. And even with January heralding a new year, you can be sure that things are going to go on just as they are, if not worse. But it’s the notion of hope that keeps the pages turning, wondering what will happen to the colonel (and his wife) as he sticks to his guns, rather than just sell the rooster and dine out on it, relieving the pressure of waiting for the pension.

While Márquez is better known for being at the forefront of the subgenre tagged ‘magical realism’, No One Writes To The Colonel, eschews the magical part and gets right down to the realism, tackling the effects of censorship, poverty, and hope with an undercurrent of humour. Its cast infringe a little on the realism, being grotesques, but at the same time they are everymen suffering the hardships of Colombian life under martial rule.  And if no one is writing to the colonel, at least someone’s writing about him.

Originally published as a serial in a Colombian newspaper back in 1955, The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor, to my surprise given other Márquez titles, is a piece of non-fiction. It was only attributed to Gabriel García Márquez in 1970 and tells the story of Colombian sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, as told to Márquez. While the full title pretty much covers the bulk of the story (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time) there’s a great deal of action here despite being pretty much restricted to a raft.

Leaving Alabama after eight months of repair work, the Colombian destroyer, Caldas, is heading home. Only a couple of hours from ending their journey a number of sailors are knocked overboard, their ship sailing on innocent of their loss. In the subsequent scramble the narrator Velasco recalls seeing his friends in the water with him as he fought his way to a raft. And then, one by one, they disappeared until he was alone at sea.

The next ten days are Velasco’s account of his time as his hopes of rescue abandon him, as starvation, thirst, and the sun take their toll on his mind and body, leading him to hallucinations. And that’s not all - he hunts for fish and gulls, fights against the sharks that punctually arrive each day, and saves himself when the raft overturns. Twice! It’s amazing how much action you can fit into ten days in such a confined space. But eventually, as the lengthy title states, it all comes to an end when he ends up ashore in the place he least expects: his own Colombia.

As Márquez’s first real work, there’s little of the style that he would become famous for - and, indeed, take the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature - and his journalistic tendencies see him reporting the account from Velasco’s perspective, adding colour where necessary, and bringing life to the page. And, despite it’s basis in fact, there’s something of the myth to it, given perhaps the solitary nature of one man’s fight for survival amidst the unforgiving sea.

The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor is a relatively quick read covering the stubborn will to live of one man with a positive outcome. Sprinkled amongst its pages there’s some interesting tidbits of survival and enough action to maintain such a narrative account. There’s also an emotional connection as we wonder what it’s like to be feared dead, what our families and friends must think. And given the current climate of people becoming celebrities for absolutely anything, this book shows that, no matter where these people are in the world, it’s not such a recent phenomenon after all.