Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The story is deceptively simple: A young girl in a South American village (a setting almost all Marquez's works share) is married and it is found that she has already lost her virginity. Her brothers are then bound by honor to kill the man responsible, an act they have no interest in doing but do nonetheless because no one will stop them. I am giving nothing away here, all the details of the story are revealed in the first few pages. What elevates this simple story to the grand level of all Marquez works is the brilliant structure and execution. Marquez succeeds, as always, in putting a fresh spin on a timeless plot.

Marquez gives us the events leading up to the murder from several different angles and with each different angle a new wrinkle in the fabric of the story unfolds. What we learn is that there scarcely a person in the whole town who could not have helped rescue the victim from his early end. The killers did not hide their mission, on the contrary they announced it to whoever crossed their path and delayed the doing of the deed until they could not wait any longer. It is this fact which sticks with the reader of the book long after he has finished reading and Marquez explores the question of responsibility at length.

I recommend that "Chronicle of Death Foretold" be read as an intro to Marquez and if you like it then move on to the more imposing works like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Autumn of the Patriarch". For those Marquez fans who have not "Chronicle of Death Foretold" yet, I encourage them to do so right away. It easily hold up to his best material, even within its smaller framework.

The novella, a narrative written twenty-seven years after the murder by Nasar's journalist friend, serves as a detailed history of the hours leading up to the crime. The entire population of a fictional Latin American village comprise the cast of characters and as we become privy to their actions and memories, the one certainty we learn is that everyone had a part to play in this crime.

The night before the murder, Angela Vicario had married Bayardo San Roman in a lavish and costly ceremony. However, when San Roman learns that Angela is not a virgin he returns her to her mother immediately. When pressed to name the man who stole her virginity and disgraced the family name, Angela answers, "Santiago Nasar."

Nothing points to the truthfulness of Angela's assertion, but her twin brothers, Pablo and Pedro, who are pig butchers by profession, sharpen their knives and begin their search for Nasar.

Although "there had never been a death more foretold," every one of the town's citizens has some reason, valid or not, for doing little or nothing to prevent the death of Nasar.

Even Nasar, himself, until the final moments, seems oblivious to what every other person in the town is well aware of. Amazingly, he seems to either feel himself above death or simply resigned to his fate.

The narrator of Chronicle of a Death Foretold presents many instances and situations that could have saved the life of Nasar yet failed to do so, underscoring one of Garcia Marquez's signature themes--irony.

Some of the town's citizens, like Victoria Guzman, Nasar's cook, have private reasons for wishing him dead. Many assume that Nasar must surely be aware of the danger himself, while others simply discount the Vicario brothers announcement as drunken boasting.

By the time Nasar walks onto the dock to meet the visiting bishop's boat, everyone there knows how and why he's going to be killed. And, when the Vicario brothers begin their attack, no one lifts a finger to stop it.

During the final, surrealistic pages of the book, Nasar rises from the bloodied ground and dusts off his own entrails before "entering the house of his mother" and announcing, "They've killed me, Wene child," as he falls on his face in the kitchen.

Garcia Marquez illuminates, not only the duplicity behind the Latin "code of honor," but the hypocrisy of the women as well, a hypocrisy that makes a mockery of the community's strict code of behavior.

The little understood "cult of machismo" is also explored and Garcia Marquez shows us how the men's strict adherence to that cult contributed heavily to the death of Nasar.

While the narrator of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is unable to come to any firm conclusions regarding Nasar's death, he does show us the overwhelming inevitability of it all. Too many forces, including apathy, assumption and even chance are all moving in the same direction and all contribute to the final, harrowing outcome. This sense of the inevitable pervades every line of the book and we know there could have been no way the life of Nasar could have been spared.

Although told in a straightforward (though non-linear) manner, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not a straightforward story. It is complex, shocking and powerful and surrelistic in its approach. It concerns itself with the power of death in life and how one death affects and transforms an entire community.

The language used in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is, at times, shocking and even brutal, but it is perfectly suited to the shocking and brutal story it tells.

In an early interview, Garcia Marquez mentioned the debt he owned to Juan Rulfo, author of Pedro Paramo. Although Chronicle of a Death Foretold is highly original, Rulfo's influence can clearly be seen. The two novellas parallel each other in their surrealistic qualities, the ever-present sense of death and meaninglessness and the inevitability of life's final outcome. Both works are characterized by unrelieved darkness and a descent into something unamed, from which it is impossible to return.

As with all of Garcia Marquez's works, this book is flawless. It is a highly rewarding, yet disturbing work that forces us to look at the inevitable presence of death in life and the uncertainty of even the next moment.