Book summary

By the time the young, rich, and handsome Santiago Nasar was murdered by the Vicario brothers nearly everyone in the small Latin American town knew the murder was going to happen except for Nasar himself. The new bride Angela Vicario had been revealed to not be a virgin on her wedding night, and she had named the unfortunate Nasar as her "perpetrator," sending her brothers on a hell-bent mission for "honor." Twenty-seven years later, the novel's narrator tries to untangle the myriad causes and consequences of the violent act--and finds himself tangled in the peculiar psychology and motivations of the townspeople, along with their sins, flaws, and follies. Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's intricate novella delicately exposes the simmering issues of class, religion, convention, and distorted concepts of good and evil that brought about the inexplicable crime. CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD lacks the magical realist flourishes for which Garcia Marquez is famous, but his subject, once again, is the infusion of reality with the forces of dream, illogic, and mystery.

Media reviews

"Richly sardonic...One could not find a more vivid caricature of that lethal blend of machismo, braggadocio, and hypertrophic sense of honor that sullies South American society."