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Title: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ISBN: 0-345-31002-0 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 12 February, 1984 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.06 (78 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Comment: Yet another gem from Marquez. I'll admit though, at first I was a little bored with it, but I think that is more because I just read three novellas by him in two days.
Chronicle is basically the story of a man who wants to find out just why the town in which he lived allowed Nasar to be killed by the Vicario twins, even though they made their intentions clear to almost everybody, and with hours of warning. The story is filled with Marquez' trademarks: sadness, solitude, love and effortlessly magical sentences that just seem to come out of nowhere and are beautifully nestled between more mundane efforts.
I think, at its heart, that this story is about how it is easy for everyone to just let someone else handle the problem, and that until something happens, it is almost impossible to believe that it will, no matter how much evidence there is before you. Literally over a dozen people had ample and easy opportunity to warn Nasar before the event, and in fact many were going to, but then they were distracted by something that seemed more important at that instance but in fact wasn't, and the chance was lost.
It is interesting the way he wrote it. As usual, he jumps back and forth through time, but it is easy to keep a handle on what is happening because, for the most part, the events in the past (Nasar's murder) are spoken about, whereas events in the present (roughly twenty years after the death) and described. It is worth noting that almost everybody who had the opportunity to prevent Nasar's death, and those intimately related to him, they all have lived the rest of their life in sadness, and so has the town in which the murder occurred. It is almost as though the very town itself has to pay for the crime, not the murderers themselves, they get off scott free (mostly).
Rating: 5
Summary: A surprising complexity
Comment: The popular notion is that Love in the Time of Cholera may be Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's best book, and that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the one that made him famous. But what many people don't know is that Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the book that won Mr. Garcia-Marquez the Nobel Prize.
Sure, that's mostly a quirk of the calendar. But the book was Mr. Garcia-Marquez's most recent publication when the Nobel committee sat down to discuss who deserved the award for literature in 1982. And though it's hard to imagine anyone on the committee nominating the venerable Colombian as a result of this slim volume, it is easy to conclude that nothing here would make them second guess their votes either.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold has everything that makes the work of Mr. Garcia-Marquez such a joy, albeit in abbreviated form. Its pages contain great characters and names, unusual events made believable by the storyteller's skill, a mysterious storyline, a surprising complexity.
And because of its diminutive size and straightforward style, it's a great way to sample the Mr. Garcia-Marquez's work for the first time.
If you do that and enjoy the story, try News of a Kidnapping in addition to the two great novels mentioned above. The two -- News of a Kidnapping and Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- are the two novels that employ a style that harkens back to Mr. Garcia-Marquez's early days as a journalist, using interviews and investigation as a base for a fictionalized reconstruction of real events recounted with the same style that earned the author his reputation.
Rating: 4
Summary: Death in Garcia Marquez style
Comment: Garcia Marquez once again delights his readers in this short novel, written with a lot of irony and humour.
The story is an account that presents a typical behaviour of a 'macho society', where Santiago Nasar gets killed by the two Vicario brothers as a way to defend the "honor" of their sister, who they discover was not a virgin on the night of her wedding.
Most of the novel deals with the detailed actions of the Vicarios to kill Nasar. This provides the background for the story, which turns out to be more about the people of a small Caribbean village with their morals, manners, and way of thinking and perceiving the world. It makes for a story that is at once very captivating and challenging.
It is intriguing to note that everybody in the story knows that Nasar was to be killed but nobody took the action to prevent the murder. Instead of warning poor Nasar, the villagers gathered around to watch the exciting and horrible event.
This book is different from the best known style of Garcia Marquez, magical realism. This time the story is more traditional, but nonetheless carried along by the charm of a master story teller.
The events and the details unfold little by little unfold, centered on an unanswered question: was Nasar indeed the one who took Angela's virginity? This creates a kind of suspense that makes the book even more compelling, leaving room for speculation.
This is simply a great book, well written, compact, and definitely not to be missed by anyone wishing to experience another piece of Garcia Marquez's talent. The journalistic approach of telling the events - combined with the satire towards religion, legal system, morals, and the irony - combine to make the book a wonderful piece of literature.
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Title: The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende ISBN: 0553273914 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ISBN: 0140119906 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ISBN: 0060929790 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Stranger by Albert Camus ISBN: 0679720200 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ISBN: 0060932678 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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