After reading so much praise for this author, I purchased two books by him. The first one was a major disappointment, and had I read it first, I would not have bought the second one, but since I already had it and had just finished Love in the Time of Cholera, I decided to read it and get it over with. Big mistake. Big waste of time. Big waste of money. I did not enjoy reading about the condition of the dead body, with its intestines hanging out, nor did I enjoy reading about the autopsy. Never again will I buy a book by Gabriel Garcia Màrquez. ( )

See Foretelling,After the Fact at From Word to Word

The novella centers on a courtship, a wedding, and a murder. There’s no magic realism in these pages. There is fatal realism, for sure. It concerns mass guilt and a stab at the culture of machismo that has so pervaded the decisions of an entire village to condone a murder. Throughout the narrative, a sustained voice of inevitability permeates the telling that it is impossible not to turn your eyes away from the pages, even if the outcome is already foretold.

The man whose death is chronicled is Santiago Nasar. The motive is clear: he is accused of an unforgiveable crime of tarnishing the honor of a just-married woman, Angela Vicario. Only in the man’s death will the woman’s honor be regained. A crime is then set in motion – a murder that has every chance of being thwarted and yet every indication of being a foregone conclusion.

My complete review is here:
http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2009/08/... ( )

It's not that I don't enjoy Marquez' writings, it's more that I think the translations may emphasize a certain portentousness that may not (or, for all I know, may) be present in the originals. Just look at the title of this book, which in Spanish is Crónica de una muerte anunciada. The last word is translated by Gregory Rabassa as "Foretold." Is it wrong? Well, not completely; but it does underscore the "magical realism" element much more than the simple, and more exact, "Announced," or even "Proclaimed." True, the novella begins with a character presumably misunderstanding the more ominous signficance of the soon-to-be-victim's dream; so, "foretelling" is certainly part of the meaning of the title. But, much more, "announced" has a wider and more compelling application; it comprehends both the identification of the victim as the bride's "perpetrator" (which of course leads to the inevitable consequences), but also to the murderers' repeated declarations of their intentions, which gives numerous characters a chance to speculate on the ambivalence of the killers. There is also also the sense that the narrrator is continuing to "announce" the death decades after its enactment, a sense that is lost with the use of the word "foretold." Am I making too much of this? Perhaps so; it's only everything. ( )

Marquez sure is one of my favorites, but this book was not. What I did love about it was the angle, which I'm sure many people will agree actually adds a bit to the intrigue. ( )