Chronicle of a Death Foretold |
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| Title: | Chronicle of a Death Foretold |
| Author: | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| Publisher: | Vintage |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 07 October, 2003 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 140003471X / 9781400034710 |
| List Price: | $13.00 |
| You Save: | $3.90 |
| Amazon Price: | $9.10 |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
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Customer Reviews:
• Incredibly Depressing
21 July, 2009
Everyone in the town was in a state of nonexistence. A town of living ghosts. A moral conscience seemed completely absent in this town. The Bishop had only a fleeting and distant existence himself. This was a middle class town. Void of all real emotion. A town's collective moral conscience atrophied and diseased by their autonomy. They contributed only to their community and worked only to sustain it.
This story makes me angry and sad all at once. I'm angry that people could be so hypocritical and dumb. I'm sad because the only person in town with some color and strength succumbs to the town's mindless inhabitants.
I feel the behavior in this story could be replicated in any community where necessities are provided and personal growth undervalued.
- Amazon Customer Review
• A Beautiful And Complex Tale Of A Tragic Killing
16 November, 2009
Let me begin with a warning that I am going to discuss this book in some detail and will mention several key plot details. If you want to remain spoiler free, do not read my review. Just take my word that this is an absolutely brilliant book and that if you love great literature, you will almost certainly love this.
One of the biggest gaps in my reading is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a cap that I am currently attempting to close. I have read his two most famous novels, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and LOVE IN A TIME OF CHOLERA, but until this short book nothing else. My plan in the next couple of months is to read seven or eight of his most important works, and this was the first book toward that end.
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD is apparently simple but deceptively complex. The tale it tells is simple. A bridegroom on his wedding night discovers that his bride is not a virgin and renounces their marriage. Her mother wheedles out of her the name of her violator and her brothers, in order to restore family honor, vow to kill the person their sister named, Santiago Nasar, a half Arab who is a young but affluent resident of their Caribbean village. The narrator of the tale, a friend of the murdered Santiago Nasar, later investigates and decides that it is unlikely that he deflowered the girl.
The story contains a critique of not only honor killing, but the stupidity of social systems based absurd social values. The narrator notes that some regard the one true victim in the tale to be the bridegroom, who supposedly was dishonored by being deceived by his bride's virginity. We in the United States find this glorification of virginity - indeed, the fetishizing of it - baffling. Or do we? In some fundamentalist communities we see daughters pledging their virginity to their fathers. Most Americans will find this just as perplexing as a bridegroom being able to annul a marriage because his bride's hymen was not intact. And while we in America find honor killing to be unacceptable, a majority of our citizens remain in favor of state-sanctioned execution, which is viewed as barbaric by most other advanced nations.
This system of honor drives all the events in the book. The bridegroom rejects his bride because of this sense of violated honor, and we learn later that he never truly recovers and in fact many years later, a broken man, returns to his wife are both in early middle age. The brothers have no real desire to kill Santiago Nasar and even hope that someone will intervene, believing that being frustrated in their attempt would satisfy the demands of honor. That they are not prevented is somewhat of a quirk, since many want to intervene but fail for one reason or another. Santiago meanwhile, unaware of being accused of being the deflower of Angela Vicario, goes about his business, living out the last few minutes of his life. Accepting the system of honor, no one has any real choice. Freedom of will is not at operation. The claim of some that many crimes are caused not by individuals but by the influence of society is viewed with ridicule. Here in this tale there is a sense in which the Vicario twins are not the ones responsible for the killing of Santiago Nasar, but their society. The powerlessness that grips each character is driven home as Santiago's murder is reenacted again and again in each chapter. Each chapter drives home the senseless of the whole affair.
One of the most fascinating things about the book is that we don't know who actually took the virginity of Angela Vicario. Whoever is was, they fail to loom as a figure of significance. We don't even know for certain why she names Santiago Nasar, though one can speculate that it is was because she was in love with him and felt spurned by his inattention. The Vicario brothers took their sister's claim as incontestably true and did not even allow Santiago an opportunity to deny the charges. While the murder of Santiago Nasar satisfied the demands of honor, it did not in fact punish her real lover. Justice was done within the honor system despite the wrong person being killed.
This is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking short novels that I have ever read. It has left me even more excited about exploring Garcia Marquez's books than I was before.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Brilliant
08 February, 2010
One of the best books written by Garcia Marquez, and everything he writes is a masterpiece!
- Amazon Customer Review
• I'd Like To Make Some Suggestions
04 December, 2009
Don't even read this unless you've read the book. This review is not intended to help you figure out whether you ought to buy or read the book - of course you should, at least, read it - but to help some readers appreciate it.
Reviewing the plot: the beautiful Angela Vicario marries the powerful Bayardo San Roman, but on her wedding night she is found not to be a virgin; devastated, Bayardo returns her to her family. She tells her brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, that her "perpetrator" was Santiago Nasar. The brothers, to preserve the family's honor, kill Santiago. At the time of the murder the narrator was sleeping with a prostitute - a prostitute whom Santiago loved. Twenty years later the narrator decides to return to the village and investigate the murder. Memories are faded and confused; people tell the narrator stories that contradict what they'd told an investigator so many years before - but the investigator's report has also been partly lost, damaged in a flood.
It's already obvious that the fallibility of memory is a central theme, for which the flood damage to the investigator's report is a simple (and perfect) symbol. The narrator even calls the village "forgotten." One level deeper, the fallibility and pseudo-infallibility of texts is being considered as well.
Another favorite for commentators is social class: Bayardo is able to choose his wife because of his money, and she is unable to reject him because of her poverty; Bayardo unintentionally kills an old widower by offering so much money for the man's beloved home; a poor young woman, Divina Flor, who works for Santiago, "feels herself destined for his furtive bed," as he molests her; and so on. However, the poor get their day: the lowly Vicario brothers kill the rich Bayardo, with the help of Divina Flor, who accidentally (ahem) collaborated by (mistakenly) telling Santiago's mother that he was in the house. In fact he was outside, so when the mother locked the door, she locked him out, putting him at the mercy of the killers.
Now it is obvious that the unreliability of the reports is another theme. Several characters report not believing each other, and nearly everyone here seemed to mention the inconsistent reports of the weather. But most interestingly to me there is no reason beyond typical readerly gullibility for so many readers to believe what Divina Flor (twenty years afterward) tells the investigating narrator about her mistake. Even if she made an honest mistake about Santiago being in the house, she or her mother could have warned him of the danger earlier in the day when he was eating breakfast, but they both chose not to. She tells the narrator that her mother wanted Santiago dead; but the only reason she can give for failing to warn him was that she was just a scared naive little girl: in other words, a virgin.
So we have every reason to suspect Divina Flor and her mother of active collaboration in the crime. Of course neither of them admit to it, but there are interesting problems with their testimonies. For instance, Divina says that before he was killed, she'd seen Santiago come in holding something she couldn't see clearly, but looked like a bouquet of roses. After he was repeatedly stabbed by the brothers, Santiago in fact does enter the house, carrying his intestines. Clearly the Divina of twenty years later has confused what she actually did see after the murder with what she claimed to see beforehand. But at the time, what had she seen? Perhaps - nothing?
Perhaps there are allusions to Oedipus Rex - the repeated reference to birds ~ the sphinx, blindness, foreigners, prophecy, the quest for truth, and as we'll see below, arguably even incest - though none are undeniable. But unlike poor Oedipus, Divina Flor triumphed over her unwanted fate ("Santiago's furtive bed"), even if she really did believe that Santiago was in the house. I'm saddened a little that most readers to not appreciate her triumph, and I'm forced to blame the rather incompetent narrator.
But is he so incompetent? A question far too few reviewers have asked is who in fact deflowered Angela. The narrator gives us pretty good reasons to believe that it was not Santiago, who seemed completely unaware of the crime and startled by the accusation. One obvious suspect looms large, and I am very disappointed that none of the reviewers here have suggested... obviously... the narrator.
Of course the narrator reports that (twenty years later) he asked Angela Vicario and she insisted that it was Santiago - calling the narrator "cousin" as she does so. But why trust him? Have we really read Fitzgerald, Kafka, Salinger, Nabokov and so on without learning to suspect the narrator? The narrator who is in some obvious ways the double of Santiago? We'll never know (and too few readers will ask) why the narrator decided to dig up all these memories twenty years after the fact, visiting several people now scattered around the country to get their testimony, and telling us how much work it was to find the investigator's report in the flooded basement of a government office in a distant city. Had he really nothing else to do?
Many other reviewers do a good job of discussing the significance of gender and especially "machismo." A few mentioned that, as with other GGM stories, there may be allegories or symbols of Colombian politics. But did anyone notice that Angela's birthday is a national holiday, or wonder why? And that her husband, with his melodramatically offended honor, is the son of a great national hero?
The last theme I'd like to mention is ir/rationality. The story is loaded with inconsistencies, explanations that don't make sense, unreasonable reasons. Santiago's mother can accurately interpret dreams provided she hasn't eaten yet, Santiago never used the back door of his house when he was dressed up, and so on. It is not clear whether the narrator is trying to make sense of such things, or is comfortable with their senselessness - were it clear, it would be less thematic.
This book deserves several reads because of its complex cleverness. I strongly disagree with reviewers who have called it heartbreaking, harrowing, shocking, brutal, and so on. People who feel that way need to read "Sophie's Choice," "Lolita," "A Tale of Love and Darkness," "In the Forest" and so on. This is not a criticism of the story. Those inaccurate adjectives are supplied by readers created in the image of the original investigator, who, although striving to find a rational explanation for things, merely glosses everything with romantic cliches: "the fatal door" is given as a typical example. The book is immensely clever - more so than most reviewers have appreciated - but rather than tragic (or any other typical romantic aspiration) it is essentially ironic, wry, darkly comic. It seems the final joke, one destined to be poorly appreciated, is on the reader.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Good Delivery!
22 December, 2009
The condition of the book was good. Recipient was satisfied. Order was delivered on time. Tracking shipping very useful.
- Amazon Customer Review
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