Chronicle of a Death Foretold

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Overview

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) is a short novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. A narrator returns to his home town decades later to reconstruct the killing of Santiago Nasar, whom two brothers murdered to defend their sister's honour. The crime was announced in advance, yet nobody prevented it. The book reads like a journalistic investigation and asks how a whole community can allow a murder it knew was coming. Its value for learners is as a study of collective responsibility, rumour, honour codes and the unreliability of memory.

Context

García Márquez was a journalist before he was a novelist, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The novel is based on a real killing in a Colombian town in the early 1950s that touched his own family circle. It belongs to Latin American literature in which realism and the extraordinary mix, but this book is restrained and documentary in style.