Books: “Chronicles of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A nightmarish tale in which the reader floats along a village. Tranced in a drunken stupor from a strange wedding, the sleepy village is awoken only by a violent outcome that continues to haunt. The narrator attempts to reconstruct fate’s doing, decades after the crime, sifting through contrasting memories of the villagers, and the guilt they still carry, to try and find a reason for Santiago’s death. As if by black magic, characters and habit were woven in together to create the shroud for murder. Why do I write when Marquez does it best?

“For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.”

Feb 20-21