Chronicle of a Death Foretold

I'm honestly not sure what I just read. I'm used to fiction plots having twists, or making you wonder what's going to happen, or having a moral lesson. This – didn't really do any of those things. You're told what's going to happen in the first sentence of this novella. There's only one question, and it's never answered. I'm not really sure what the lesson is, if there is one. I'm just baffled at the entire thing.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a novella about a man's death. A woman gets married, her bridegroom discovers she's not a virgin, returns her to her family, and her brothers kill the man who stole her virginity. That's really all there is to the story. The brothers are completely open about what they plan to do – the narrator thinks they didn't really want to carry out the murder and were hoping the townspeople would prevent them from doing so. The narrator is one of the townspeople, a friend of the victim, who is investigating the entire incident some twenty years later, trying to figure out why it happened and why exactly no one was able to prevent it.

Garcia Marquez writes well; his descriptions flow beautifully, his characters are interesting. Chronicle of a Death Foretold was not very linear, starting on the morning of the man's death and hopping between the events of that day and twenty years later. I don't mind slightly non-linear books, but this one annoyed me a bit. (Strangely, I loved The Time-Traveler's Wife, which is not linear in the least.)

I'll be reading another Garcia Marquez book soon – Love in the Time of Cholera – and plan to watch the movie, too, before I review it here. So I'll give him another shot. But Chronicle of a Death Foretold just...confuses me.

Nice perspectivist story with some religious and character subtext that adds unique layers to the story. A new favorite of mine. 9/10.

Una buena historia que practica el perspectivismo, con detalles de transfondo con conotación religiosa y personajes con psicología tridimensional. Márquez creó una nueva obra favorita mía 9/10.