In 1981, Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published, one of the best-known novels by the legendary Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, 1937 – 2014), a work of fiction that has overtones of journalism due to the reconstruction of the events of the fatal fate of Santiago Nazar.
“The day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for the ship in which the bishop was arriving.” Thus begins the endearing story told in five chapters by a chronicler – his name is never mentioned – who recounts what happened before, during and after that Sunday of the murder of Santiago Nasar, a slender and pale 22-year-old young man of Arab descent. , somewhat cheerful and serene. He is pointed out as guilty of seriously injuring Ángela Vicario, a young woman who has just married Bayardo San Román, a handsome and wealthy 30-year-old train engineer, and, consequently, the twin brothers Pablo and Pedro Vicario decide to kill Nasar. moments after her sister’s big wedding, proclaiming the news through the streets of the town at dawn, carrying the rumor to the ears of the town’s inhabitants, except those of Santiago.
What characterizes this story is time management, it is a non-linear narrative, but that is not an impediment to telling a story, just another way of doing it. For example, the first chapter focuses on Santiago’s family; the second is about how their relationship between Bayardo and Angela is woven long before the murder. On the other hand, the narrator resorts to what he witnessed and other voices, thus granting a richness in the elaboration of the “chronicle” with the testimonies that the inhabitants of the town and their acquaintances tell him.
As a result of his narrative sensibility, in 1982, the Swedish Academy recognized the creator of the fantastic world of Macondo with the Nobel Prize for Literature for his prolific career, endowed with magical realism, that subtle mix between the real and the fantastic, coming from the imagination and experience as in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), to the point of being compared to William Faulkner -one of his leading writers- and even Honoré de Balzac.
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