12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simplemente Magica, July 6, 2004
This review is from: Cronica de una muerte anunciada (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)
La prosa y la manera tan descriptiva que Gabriel Garcia tiene para escribir este libro es simplemente magica. Es como una historia detectivesca metafisica, cuando todo esta predicho para la muerte del personaje principal 'Santiago Nassar'. Ciertamente esta historia me mantuvo al borde del suspenso hasta el gran climax de la historia que detalladamente describe la muerte que causa que no solo los asesinos sean juzgados, pero todo el pueblo entero.
En verdad es una obra maestra.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, March 13, 2006
This review is from: Cronica de una muerte anunciada (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)
{en}
Great book. It's the first time I read any of Garcia's works, but this one certainly got my attention. As another reviewer said on another version of the book, eventhough you know from the very beginning (from the title even) that Santiago is going to die, you can't help but keep reading to know more details about this fact. Very well done. Will be buying a different book from him and I'm quite certain I won't be disappointed.
{es}
Muy buen libro. Primera vez que leo una obra de Garcia Marquez, pero esta me llamó mucho la atención. Como alguien más dijo acerca del libro, aunque uno sabe desde el principio que Santiago va a morir (hasta por el título), uno no puede parar de leer para saber más detalles sobre lo que va a pasar. Me parece que está muy bien escrito. Voy a comprar otros de sus libros, ya que seguramente me vayan a gustar.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It takes a village..., March 31, 2011
This review is from: Cronica de una muerte anunciada (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)
"El día que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5.30 de la mañana . . . ". What a brilliant opening! "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar woke up at five-thirty in the morning." The phrase "lo iban a matar" recurs often throughout the book. It is a killing that first occurs offstage near the beginning of the novela, but each subsequent chapter will renew the suspense as the narrator revisits the events again and again over a period of 23 years. Only at the very end do we see the murder close up, and by then it has taken on almost surreal proportions.
This is a kind of mystery story, but the mystery is not in the identity of the murderers or the motive. Santiago Nasar, 21 years old, of Arab extraction and heir to his father's business in this small town on Colombia's Caribbean coast, is stabbed by the twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario, to avenge their sister's honor. Over the weekend, the entire town has been celebrating the wedding of an even richer and more recent arrival, Bayardo San Román, who has chosen 20-year-old Ángela Vicario almost on a whim, even though she hardly knows and does not love him. But in the middle of the night, he returns her to her family saying that she was not a virgin. Ángela names Santiago Nasar as the man who dishonored her, and her brothers, who have been drinking all weekend, act upon her accusation, announcing their intention to all and sundry.
The true mysteries are many. Who really deflowered Ángela Vicario (for nobody really believes it was Santiago Nasar)? And how could so many people -- virtually the entire village -- know about the intended murder but do nothing to stop it? Is it significant that both the victim and the accuser are foreigners by origin, though with quite different histories (Nasar, who speaks Arabic, is a third-generation resident; Bayardo arrived from some other part of the country only a short time before)? And metaphysically, how could an event such as this both reveal and subsequently change the lives of so many people -- even awakening love where no love had bloomed before?
The Wikipedia article on the book includes a character map of all the people mentioned and how they interconnect. It is amazingly complex spiderweb for a mere novela of 118 pages. But it inculpates an entire society, and our human society beyond it. It takes a village to raise a child -- yet that same village can turn a blind eye to the killing of a man.
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