Book Report: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

What a strange little book. I suppose it's a novella, as it's barely 120 pages.

This is the second Gabriel Garcia Marquez book I've read recently and now, after breezing through this one, I'm not sure why I've been so thoroughly confounded by 100 Years of Solitude.

The plot is clever and simple. Santiago Nasar is a rich young guy going about his morning when two brothers hack him to pieces. The time change from the first page to the last is maybe 2 hours, tops, beginning with Nasar getting out of bed and ending with his death a short while later. While there are plenty of flashbacks, all of which explain why Nasar gets killed, most of the book deals with explaining every minute detail of what was happening in the town where at one point or another everyone, including Nasar, knew he was going to be killed, yet it still happened.

It's a dark book, but also funny. No one takes the killers seriously. In fact, they're reluctant to do what they feel compelled to do. The humor is in the reactions of the townspeople to the brothers and their openness about the murder. They go around talking about it all morning, all but pleading with people to stop them.

Eventually, though, Marquez makes clear that he's discussing something very wrong and cowardly about human nature. There's a strange split between the language and tone of most of the book and the grisly violence of the murder. It reminds me of those car commercials on lately that seem to be stupid ads with people having silly conversations while driving, then there's suddenly a horrible accident and it turns out the ad is about car safety.

Marquez is perhaps more artful, if only because it's clear what he's building to all along, as in Life of Pi, where the whimsical tone is constantly masking something horrifying.

The last thing I want to point out is the cover. The copy I read had the cover you see here, with the bride holding a bouquet of eyeballs, with a large knife in front of her and what might be a cracked tombstone behind her. This is a terrific picture. It's fully symbolic of the story without giving anything away. It's comical but also very morbid, which fits perfectly.