Rating  - Creative, Brilliant Novella - Absolutely Fascinating, Even After Repeated Readings Through the Years
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The story begins with sentence: "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat that the bishop was coming on." We readers know from the beginning that Nasar will die today. Each of the five chapters recount the events leading up to the murder, providing different perspectives and contradictory statements; there was not even agreement on whether it rained, and if so, how much.
Angelo Vicario is discovered not to be a virgin on her wedding night. Under pressure she reveals that Santiago Nasar had been her lover, and her two brothers reluctantly carryout Nasar's murder to recover the family honor. The narrator doubts whether Nasar was Angelo Vicario's actual lover. We never learn for certain.
Pablo and Pedro Vicario make no secret of their plan, and appear (at least from some accounts) to be almost waiting for someone to intervene, but no one steps forth. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is an example of magical realism that is also characteristic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's highly respected novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. The inexorable unfolding of events, implausible given the widespread knowledge of the planned murder, resists natural explanations.
The partially contradictory, incomplete accounts did leave me with unanswered questions, and yet the denouement (at the beginning, rather than the end?) is not unsatisfying. There continues to be enough puzzlement on my part, however, that I find myself every few years returning to Chronicle of a Death Foretold. This brilliant, deliciously ambiguous novella can probably be best compared with Faulkner's remarkable The Sound and the Fury, or Joseph Kafka's disturbing short story, The Trial.
Rating  - Death foretold; character revealed
Can the tale of murder and cowardice and fatal pride be enjoyable? No. Can it be telling, instructive, and artful? Yes.
There are times--when guts are spilled and meanness revealed--this chronicle is difficult to read. But, human nature is sometimes difficult to stomach.
Thanks to Marquez's artistry, I have felt a local, visited a time, and experienced a culture foreign to me. And, at that local and time, I have seen my universal brothers act shamefully.
Rating  - A Spanish cultural window
Cold blooded murder as Spanish honor... by twins with butcher knives.
A transplanted Arab who took a maiden's virtue, so that her husband took her back to her mother's house on their wedding night.
This novel is very well written so that you feel like you have been transported to a past time.
The Spanish male has two sets of morals: one for the public image
and the other for private life.
In a way the young Arab man met an end of his own making?
Death sentence for consenting sex is just not a very modern American attitude.
Rating - Marquez & magic realism---start here
This was the first Marquez book I read when I was in my teens and it made me a fan. It also started a literary love affair with the South American writers. Having been raised with English, American, & Russina literature, magic realism opened my eyes to a new and different way of seeing/imagining the "underpinnings" of events. This is not Marquez's finest book, but it is certainly a great story and worth a read. Some of the other reviews mentioned that something was lost in translation, I don't remember what version I read, but it certainly captured my attention from the opening "death" until the inevitable conclusion/pay-off to the story. It is short enough to be read in an evening, so if you want a taste of Marquez this is a good place to start.
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