Sunday book pick: A murder is announced in Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’
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“‘But no matter how much they tossed the story back and forth, no one could explain to me how poor Santiago Nasar ended up being involved in such a mix-up.’ The only thing they knew for sure was that Angela Vicario’s brothers were waiting for him to kill him.”
Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 120-page novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa and published immediately after. As the Nobel Prize citation noted, this new novel too presented “a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” Readers in English must have been suitably intrigued by the title, for a few decades earlier, Agatha Christie had attempted this trope in her 1950 Miss Marple mystery, A Murder is Announced. However, unlike Christie who had foretold only the time and place of the murder, Márquez foretells the time, place, the victim, and the perpetrators. By all logic, this should’ve been the end of the story, for the murder is inevitable and its knowledge inspires no one to intercept it.
A murder awaits
The deed, long done but not forgotten, is remembered 27 years later as the narrator goes back in time, reconstructing the events leading up...