Gabriel García Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Small books by big writers.

I love One Hundred Years of Solitude. And that means I’ve been afraid to read anything else by García Marquez. Nothing else could possibly be that good, and reading lesser efforts by the same author might devalue the book that I love so much. What if I start to notice preoccupations or tics that show up across all of his work? The next time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I might notice that they show up even there. I don’t want to be aware when I’m reading it that it was written by a mere mortal who can be limited and maybe even annoying.

Fortunately, Chronicle of a Death Foretold doesn’t read like a lesser effort. It reconstructs the day leading up to the murder of Santiago Nasar. Everyone in town knows it’s going to happen, and a few try to stop it. But Nasar himself, and his mother, the two people who would be most motivated to save his life, are the last to know. It’s a vivid portrait of a town and its people, that ends neatly when the story ends. It was so rewarding that I’ll think for another 20 years about whether to try Love in the Time of Cholera.