Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar. Bayardo San Roman, a man on a mission to marry, arrives in a small Columbian town and immediately sweeps the townsfolk off their feet. He tells tales of bravery and adventure and has the extraordinary and bizarre talents of one who has traveled the mysterious world. As the wealthiest and most influential man in town, Bayardo can name any one of the local women as his bride, and he chooses Angela Vicario. Following an enormously elaborate ceremony and party, Bayardo discovers that Angela is not a virgin. She is promptly returned to her family's humble home where they are so disgraced that she is brutally beaten until she finally surrenders the secret lover's identity. After admitting that her lover was Santiago Nasar, her twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, despite their life-long friendship with Nasar, vow to avenge their family's spoiled honor.

Despite the non-linear narrative and the constant and tangential anecdotes, it becomes clear that Santiago Nasar is not connected to Angela in the least and is, in fact, unsuspecting and confused by the rumor of his murderous friends. It appears as though Angela merely states a name in an effort to protect the man she really loves. (Though the narrator speculates that this is possible, the reader never uncovers the truth of Angela's disastrous claim.) Most interestingly, upon Bayardo San Roman's departure Angela discovers her love for him. Angela does not mourn the loss of Nasar or a secret lover; she lives alone until Bayardo returns to her many years later.

Though Gabriel Garcia Marquez is always a genius of magical realism, this book is stylistically and thematically much simpler than other Garcia Marquez's works. Not to mention much shorter at a whopping 130 pages. However, it is just as pure-Gabriel Garcia Marquez as his best: full of wisdom, humor and skillful prose. It is a deeply disturbing and harrowingly symbolic love story that reads as absurd and, at times, hilarious. For instance, the book opens with a description of the Nasar household on the morning of his murder, and goes on to relate Santiago Nasar's last dream before his death: "He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completly spattered with bird shit." One review said Chronicle of a Death Foretold was "very strange and brilliantly concieved....a sort of metaphysical murder mystery."

So, although it doesn't feel quite as epic or relevant as One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, it reads as a Garcia Marquez mini-epic and a mystery definitely worth reading and rediscovering again.