"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel García Márquez (1981)

 **What is there to say about basically one of the most perfect novellas ever written?**

(note:  I read the first English-language translation, by Gregory Rabassa.  I don't know if there are more contemporary translations out there, if anyone has a rec of a particularly good one I'd be interested)

I actually studied this book in my high school English class (my teacher was Alec Duxbury, great teacher and pretty solid electric guitar player too).  It was senior year, so first semester was obviously spent working on college essays.  But by second semester, most of us were done with college applications and pretty checked out, so we just read a bunch of fun books and talked about them in class (others included "The Alchemist", "Equus", and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead")

On the first day we were supposed to be talking about "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", we arrived at class to find that Dux wasn't there.  Confused, we took our seats and just hung out chatting.  Finally, about 10 minutes after the bell had already rung, Dux walks in and says, "what, you're already here?  Didn't you read the note?"

In an envelope on the floor right inside the classroom door, where every single one of us had stepped over it, was a note saying, "Class will begin 15 minutes late today, feel free to hang out wherever and come back then"

Dux laughed and said, "I've been teaching this book for years.  No one ever reads the note"

What is there to say about this book?  It's widely accepted to be one of the greatest works of one of the greatest Latin American authors of all time.  It's not really a hot take to say that I loved this book.  But.  I loved this book, legitimately one of my favorite books period.  So I'll try to say something interesting about it

(side note, if anyone has read "100 Years of Solitude" but not "Chronicle" it should be pointed out that in many ways the two books couldn't be more different.  Where "100 Years" is a massive, sprawling, multi-generational epic that almost requires you to take notes while reading it, maybe sketch out some diagrams of the family try . . . "Chronicle" is tight, thriller-paced plotting and over in only 120 pages.  Man, Gabito had serious range, they should probably give him the Nobel Prize or something)

So yes, what was up with my high school English teacher's note?  Well, Santiago Nasar, the . . . protagonist?  Main character?  I mean, the most accurate term is "victim", but that seems a little mean.  We'll go with "main character".  The main character of the novel is killed--brutally murdered, in fact.  What's strange is that in fact someone tried to warn him:

Someone who was never identified had shoved an envelope under the door with a piece of paper warning Santiago Nasar that they were waiting for him to kill him, and, in addition, the note revealed the place, the motive, and other quite precise details of the plot.  The message was on the floor when Santiago Nasar left home, but he didn't see it, nor did Divina Flor or anyone else until long after the crime had been consummated

And thus, the setup for the novel.  The narrator of the novel is a member of the community, who later moved to the big city.  But he describes to us, piece by piece, relating events out of order, his attempts to piece together exactly what happened on that fateful day all those years ago.  How is it that a murder that everyone knew was going to happen, "there had never been a death more foretold," manage to take place anyways?

We can start at the beginning, I suppose.  The beautiful Ángela Vicario is married to wealthy out-of-towner Bayardo San Román, but a few hours after the end of the lavish wedding party he threw for the whole town, he drags her back to her parents' house, enraged that she is not a virgin.  After a beating from her mother, Ángela reveals that Santiago Nasar is the guilty culprit.  Her two twin brothers swear vengeance, publicly and proudly, in order to restore their family's honor.  And so, here we are

(incidentally, the novella deliberately refrains from confirming whether or not Santiago Nasar actually is Ángela Vicario's paramour.  I have my theories . . .)

As the story progresses, we find that nearly everyone in the town (except, amusingly, our narrator) knew what was going to happen.  And in an almost cosmically ordained set of circumstances, it seems none of them told Santiago Nasar.  Some, like whoever left the note, tried and failed.  Others figured the brothers were bluffing, and wouldn't actually follow through with their promise.  Others assumed that, as it was such widely spread gossip, clearly Santiago Nasar he already knew.  Others, let's not hide from the truth, just didn't like him--so while they would never kill him themselves, maybe they didn't have to warn him either.  Each person, it seems as our narrator puts all the stories together, had a different reason.  One even wanted to tell him, but when he touched her, she felt his hand "frozen and stony, like the hand of a dead man" and she got so frightened that she said nothing

The New York Times, in its review of the book when it was first published in 1981, referred to it as a "meta-physical murder mystery", and I rather like that description.  We know who did it, we know why, we know when and where and how.  Every detail of the murder is laid out over the course of the novella.  But the reader, like the narrator, is not satisfied with those simple facts.  In the end, the reader is still somehow left with the question of what exactly happened here, and how it was able to happen

Magical realism was by no means invented by the Latin American author, but Latin American Literature has proudly produced some of the finest examples of the genre--thanks in no small part to García Márquez himself.  And while nothing overtly magical happens here, the novella's events seem take place in a world that is just slightly out of step with our own, one in which the vanishingly improbable happens and none of the characters find it strange at all.  As we read, we somehow also stop finding these coincidences strange.  Rather than the events of this story being compared to how things work in the real world, we the reader are instead transported to a world just a half-step out of phase

I loved this book, however, for a simple reason:  My god, is this book tight.  Honestly, the comparisons that come to mind are not other books but films, those 90-minute films that have no wasted space, no extra fat--"Yojimbo", "Infernal Affairs", "Reservoir Dogs".  This book is only 120 pages, and it moves at an incredibly fast pace . . . and yet, there is so much depth here.  Even the side characters, the ones that are present in only a single scene, feel real.  Even the narrator, whom we meet through nothing but his recollection of events, has character and personality and maybe even his own motives

I've read this book at least a half-dozen times, and it feels like every time I do I find something new and interesting.  On a recent read, I found myself fascinated with Ángela Vicario--for a lesser author, she would have just been a MacGuffin, simply a device to set he plot in motion and then probably never talked about again.  And yet, Gabito takes the time to let her breathe and bring her own motivations to the table.  In some lights, she's a tragic heroine all on her own:

The only unforeseen surprise was caused by the groom on the morning of the wedding, for he was two hours late in coming for Ángela Vicario and she had refused to get dressed as a bride until she saw him in the house. “Just imagine,” she told me. “I would have been happy even if he hadn’t come, but never if he abandoned me dressed up.” Her caution seemed natural, because there was no public misfortune more shameful than for a woman to be jilted in her bridal gown. 

On the other hand, the fact that Ángela Vicario dared put on the veil and the orange blossoms without being a virgin would be interpreted afterwards as a profanation of the symbols of purity. My mother was the only one who appreciated as an act of courage the fact that she had played out her marked cards to the final consequences. “In those days,” she explained to me, “God understood such things.”

Listen.  I'm not saying anything new when I say that this book is a masterpiece.  But it is.  It's an absolute joy, it's a complete experience, it's a wild ride.  It's 120 pages.  Really, you have no excuse not to read it

I loved this book

Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.