Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for his short stories and novels, especially ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' which has magical vitality and a great abundance of remarkable characters and incidents. He is also known as the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. His new novel, ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold,'' which is very strange and brilliantly conceived, is a sort of metaphysical murder mystery in which the detective, Garcia Marquez himself, reconstructs events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich, handsome fellow who lived in the Caribbean town where the author grew up. Thus, as a character in his own novel, Garcia Marquez interviews people who remember the murder and studies documents assembled by the court. He accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and makes a record of what happened first, second, third, etc.
edited image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, signing in...
19/03/2009 La Ministra de Cultuta de Colombia Paul...
Image of Gabriel Garcia Marquez signatureIn short, a chronicle.
Text:
It emerges that virtually everyone in town knew Santiago Nasar was to be murdered, who would do it, where, when and why. Given so much foreknowledge, the mystery is how the murder could have happened. Some townspeople try to stop the murder. Others are so awed by their foreknowledge that they look upon Santiago Nasar, even as he stands before them, as dead. One person, his father's aging mistress, would like to kill him herself, but the two men who feel obliged to murder him as a matter of honor actually pity him and want to be stopped. They advertise their intention, become spectacularly drunk and flaunt terrible knives. ''They were like children,'' says a witness. Not really guilty, just hideously effective despite themselves. Only children can do everything, says the witness. In contrast to them, nobody else can do even one effective thing to...