Novel · A way to begin
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Crónica de una muerte anunciada
Gabriel García Márquez · 1981
Synopsis
Bayardo San Román sends his wife back to her mother on the very night of the wedding. Ángela Vicario's brothers make her name a man, sharpen their butcher's knives in the square and announce to anyone who will listen that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar. The whole village learns of it in a single morning: the baker, the priest, the mayor, the cook, the fiancée. Each believes that someone else will give warning, or that no one will go through with it. Santiago Nasar leaves his house to go and see the bishop pass.
Context
The true story came from the author's own family: in 1951, in Sucre, a childhood friend had been killed by the brothers of a woman sent back the day after her wedding. He waited thirty years to write it, the time it took for the dead man's mother to agree. The book announces the murder in the first line and then recounts, as an inquiry, how a whole town knew and did nothing: each believed someone else would warn him, or that the brothers would not do it. It is not a detective novel but its exact opposite, a mechanism in which the suspense lies in the fact that the ending is already known. The narrator, a journalist, closely resembles the author.
Who it is for
One hundred and thirty pages, a limpid construction, no magical realism. The best entry point for anyone who finds One Hundred Years of Solitude dense.
Prizes and reception
One million copies in the first Spanish print run, which was unprecedented in Latin America, and two film adaptations, in Italy and in Colombia.