Rating: 
Summary: Book gets boring
Review: The first couple chapters of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez begin to tell the story of a very interesting murder. From the start the reader knows there has been a murder, however the reader does not know they will be reading the first few chapters of the book over, and over again, throughout the novel. True to his journalistic style of writing, Marquez told this true story to expose the details of a scandalous murder. The man who was killed was a good friend of the author, and he went by the name of Santiago Nassar. He was a rich man who was murdered for being accused of taking the virginity of a woman in his small Spanish town. Even though "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is true, it contains more stylistic elements than most fiction. For a true story the reader can find a surprising amount of foreshadowing, satire, and irony. Marquez thoroughly investigated the crime, but carefully only conveyed the most important facts, and in a very objective way. He embellishes certain ideas add to the satire, etc., but the book still shows how intricate real life can be. This novel promises to be very interesting, but becomes somewhat disappointing when the reader is forced to read the same story many times over. Marquez makes the story more interesting each time he tells it, but it is still the same story. It seems as each couple chapters is a different draft, and the author used them all.
Rating: 
Summary: A metaphysical murder mystery
Review: A man returns to the town where the murder of Santiago Nasar took place 27 years before.
Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning on the Monday he was going to be killed by the twins Pedro and Pablo Vicario. The narrator is told by Placida Linero, Santiago Nasar's mother, that within the hour, her 21 year old son would be dead.
Why did the twins want to kill the proprietor of The Divine Face, the ranch he had inherited from his father? Why did they chose that particular morning, when the bishop was due to visit the village? Why wasn't Santiago Nasar aware of the fact that somebody had shoved an envelope under the door of his house with a written document warning him that he was going killed, stating in addition the place, the motive and other quite precise details of the plot? How could the murder have been committed despite the fact that nearly all the inhabitants of the town knew that it was inevitably going to happen?
The investigation of this murder takes the quality of a hallucinatory exploration into the past. The narrator's quest for the truth leads him into the darkness of human intentions, a truth that perpetually seems to slither away. This small masterpiece is one of the greatest classics of the 20th century.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging story about fate, love, women, and culture
Review: This novella just grabs you and sucks you in until you've finished the last page. I read this book for a book club and I think I enjoyed it even more because I had a chance to discuss the engaging language and themes with other readers. After all, there's so much to be said about characters such as Angela Vicario, whose mother said that her daughters were perfect because "any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to suffer." The depiction of women and love is not unique to the Latin American culture, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez's language makes it more vivid and captivating. The story is apparently based loosely on a true event, which makes it all the more intriguing. It's about a man whose imminent death is discussed throughout the town that he lives in, yet no one is able to stop it or at least warn him about it. I started reading it and got to around page 15 when I realized I wasn't paying enough attention and had to start over again from the beginning. I've heard of quite a few people getting off to a slow start with it. There are a lot of different names thrown at you, and though it's a chronicle, it's not chronological, so it's a story that needs to be read with some focus. Once you're in that focused mindset though, it's a quick read and I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Review: John-Samuel Mackay
5/23/02Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "They've killed Santiago Nasar!" This book contains various accounts of a murder in a small Colombian town. Each townsperson tells a different story about how Santiago Nasar was killed by the Vicario brothers to avenge their sister, who lost her virginity to Santiago. The narrator is interviewing people 27 years after the murder happened. The only similarities in all the testimonies is that Pedro and Pablo Vicario told everyone about their plan to kill Santiago, yet no one prevented it from happening. The author does a good job of setting the scene, however there are at times too many details. Not much is said about the lives of the people outside of this event. Each person's account is described in greater detail until finally the actual moment of his death is told. After the murder Pedro and Pablo are arrested and they give in without a fight. They tell the court that they are proud of what they did, and that they had been planning it for as long as they knew about their sister's virginity. The plan was to avenge their sister. The brothers pretty much want the crime to be seen in the largest detail possible. That is why it is a "Death Foretold." In my opinion I enjoyed reading the basic facts and hearing the story according to many different people. What made me lose focus was the endless detail in which everything was described. Honestly, do we really need to know about every relative of every character in the book? Other than that this book held my attention to the very end. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written many other novels and short stories. I have read one of his short stories A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, which I enjoyed very much. That short story describes the magical realism of an angel falling in someone's back yard. The story then becomes about what the family does with the angel as their back yard gets flooded with visitor. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is similar in the way that it captures the magical realism surrounding the murder. "Did they actually kill him after telling so many people? Chronicle is a short, action-packed novel that will keep you guessing. Even the ending of the book in some ways leaves you hanging. The last image is the exact moment Santiago Nasar dies, and nothing at all is mentioned afterward. The ending begins to lead readers to believe that there will be a sequel to this book. I definitely feel intrigued to read more of the works by Marquez.
Rating:
Summary: Fuenteovejuna did it ?
Review: How can an author keep the reader interested in his book when he gives away the ending in the first page?. Well, he needs to be an extraordinary writer, with the ability to enthrall the reader completely. Of course, not everybody can do that, but the truth is that the author of this book isn't "everybody". Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and he clearly deserved it. You can easily see that if you read some of the many master pieces he wrote: this is just one of them. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" has many ingredients that make it a wonderful book. In my opinion the most important ones are García Marquez's brilliant prose, and the risk he took by doing the unthinkable: bluntly telling the reader the end of the story in the first pages of the book. However, I think I should also highlight that the story itself is excellent: a wedding, a bride returned to her family in disgrace, her brothers forced by their code of honor to kill her previous lover, and announcing to all that want to hear them that they intend to do so. This is indeed the "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"... Everyone knows who is going to die, except for the intended victim and his mother. On the whole, this book is incredibly good and somewhat picturesque. The story takes place many years ago, in a provincial town with different values from those we have nowadays, and García Márquez manages to make the reader understand that. I couldn't ignore the sense of fatalism that pervades the book, probably due to the fact that something is already certain: things will turn out badly in the end. Despite that, even though we know from the first page what is going to happen, we still want to find out why did it happen. There is another pertinent question: who were the culprits?. The girl's brothers or the whole town, that knowing what they were going to do didn't stop them?. In Lope de Vega's words, I believe that "Fuenteovejuna did it"... But that is merely a personal opinion. My advice?. Buy this book, read it, and reach your own conclusions. You are highly likely to enjoy the process :) Belen Alcat
Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Review: Yet another gem from Marquez. I'll admit though, at first I was a little bored with it, but I think that is more because I just read three novellas by him in two days. Chronicle is basically the story of a man who wants to find out just why the town in which he lived allowed Nasar to be killed by the Vicario twins, even though they made their intentions clear to almost everybody, and with hours of warning. The story is filled with Marquez' trademarks: sadness, solitude, love and effortlessly magical sentences that just seem to come out of nowhere and are beautifully nestled between more mundane efforts. I think, at its heart, that this story is about how it is easy for everyone to just let someone else handle the problem, and that until something happens, it is almost impossible to believe that it will, no matter how much evidence there is before you. Literally over a dozen people had ample and easy opportunity to warn Nasar before the event, and in fact many were going to, but then they were distracted by something that seemed more important at that instance but in fact wasn't, and the chance was lost. It is interesting the way he wrote it. As usual, he jumps back and forth through time, but it is easy to keep a handle on what is happening because, for the most part, the events in the past (Nasar's murder) are spoken about, whereas events in the present (roughly twenty years after the death) and described. It is worth noting that almost everybody who had the opportunity to prevent Nasar's death, and those intimately related to him, they all have lived the rest of their life in sadness, and so has the town in which the murder occurred. It is almost as though the very town itself has to pay for the crime, not the murderers themselves, they get off scott free (mostly).
Rating: 
Summary: A surprising complexity
Review: The popular notion is that Love in the Time of Cholera may be Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's best book, and that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the one that made him famous. But what many people don't know is that Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the book that won Mr. Garcia-Marquez the Nobel Prize. Sure, that's mostly a quirk of the calendar. But the book was Mr. Garcia-Marquez's most recent publication when the Nobel committee sat down to discuss who deserved the award for literature in 1982. And though it's hard to imagine anyone on the committee nominating the venerable Colombian as a result of this slim volume, it is easy to conclude that nothing here would make them second guess their votes either. Chronicle of a Death Foretold has everything that makes the work of Mr. Garcia-Marquez such a joy, albeit in abbreviated form. Its pages contain great characters and names, unusual events made believable by the storyteller's skill, a mysterious storyline, a surprising complexity. And because of its diminutive size and straightforward style, it's a great way to sample the Mr. Garcia-Marquez's work for the first time. If you do that and enjoy the story, try News of a Kidnapping in addition to the two great novels mentioned above. The two -- News of a Kidnapping and Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- are the two novels that employ a style that harkens back to Mr. Garcia-Marquez's early days as a journalist, using interviews and investigation as a base for a fictionalized reconstruction of real events recounted with the same style that earned the author his reputation.
Rating:
Summary: Death in Garcia Marquez style
Review: Garcia Marquez once again delights his readers in this short novel, written with a lot of irony and humour. The story is an account that presents a typical behaviour of a 'macho society', where Santiago Nasar gets killed by the two Vicario brothers as a way to defend the "honor" of their sister, who they discover was not a virgin on the night of her wedding.
Most of the novel deals with the detailed actions of the Vicarios to kill Nasar. This provides the background for the story, which turns out to be more about the people of a small Caribbean village with their morals, manners, and way of thinking and perceiving the world. It makes for a story that is at once very captivating and challenging.
It is intriguing to note that everybody in the story knows that Nasar was to be killed but nobody took the action to prevent the murder. Instead of warning poor Nasar, the villagers gathered around to watch the exciting and horrible event.
This book is different from the best known style of Garcia Marquez, magical realism. This time the story is more traditional, but nonetheless carried along by the charm of a master story teller.
The events and the details unfold little by little unfold, centered on an unanswered question: was Nasar indeed the one who took Angela's virginity? This creates a kind of suspense that makes the book even more compelling, leaving room for speculation. This is simply a great book, well written, compact, and definitely not to be missed by anyone wishing to experience another piece of Garcia Marquez's talent. The journalistic approach of telling the events - combined with the satire towards religion, legal system, morals, and the irony - combine to make the book a wonderful piece of literature.
Rating:
Summary: A Death Foretold
Review: Not quite a mystery because the readers know who the murderers are on the se3cond page, Garcia-Márquez writes in his classic newspaper-like narrative style to detail the events leading up to the crime. In a small village with all of the suspicious activity and the murderers even making threats against our primary character (dead on the first page) the narrator is astounded that nobody stopped the crime. Garcia-Márquez does an excellent job of showing different sides to give a well-rounded perspective of events. Garcia Márquez is one of the best writers of recent times. This book should be heralded as one of his classics for its straightforward style that does not leave out any details. By the end, the reader feels as if he knows the characters personally. Garcia-Márquez accomplishes so much in such a relatively short amount of space. Why 5 stars?:
This book gets top marks for its captivating series of events and creative storytelling. The characters are so colorful and so lifelike that the reader will feel as though s/he could converse with them. Anyone interested in being "well-read" or with an interest in world literature should give this book a chance - you'll be hooked on the first page.
Rating:
Summary: Review
Review: The book was somewhat interesting but very well written. The book was told from a, for me, new point of view. It was told from the point of view of an interviewer who went around to the people that had lived in that time and found out their recollections of the events. This was an intriguing way to look at the information. Also, the novel was definitely not chronilogically oriented. Since the narrator tells the book from the order of the interviews it jumps around from place to place and is sometimes hard to follow. The book, however, didn't inspire any thinking or thought from myself. It was merely an enjoyable book to pass the time, simply a story. When I read a book I like to have it inspire thought, critical thinking, or an idea. All that this book taught me was to not take the virginity of a girl in a small Caribbean town and wait around for the consequences. That is all.
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