This books embraces any number of contradictions, in both style, tone and plotting and yet I absolutely adored it.
Plot in a Nutshell
An unnamed narrator revisits a murder that took place 27 years ago. They attempt, in an entirely non linear approach, to reconstruct both what happened and how it was allowed to happen. Santiago Nasar is killed in full public view, with advance warning, in a town where almost everyone knows what is coming. The account moves back and forth in time, circling the event through testimony, memory, rumour, and official record. What emerges is less a solution than the idea that the whole community has culpability.
Thoughts
I am not 100 percent sure I can do this justice but here goes! About those contradictions … the story is an odd mix of journalistic and magical realism styles that actually complement each other excellently. I found the language and style to be both rich, descriptive and ultimately carried the book.
The repetition is key. We see the same moments from multiple points of view, returning again and again to familiar facts. In lesser hands this would feel dull and redundent. Here, it becomes a way of driving a sense of tension. Knowing the outcome from the start does not pre-empt the suspense; rather it peaks curiousity. The question is not what happens, but how so many small failures aligned to make the outcome inevitable.
I started the novel expecting a fairly straightforward chronicling of the crime and yet I finished with no stronger sense of whether Santiago is guilty of the initial act that leads to his fate or not. The telling of the story was satisfying enough that this ambiguity did not impact my enjoyment, and I normally like my mysteries more tightly completed.
A side note – I feel Marquez carefully pokes fun at the hypocrisy of the townspeople in their attitudes and approaches to gender. Honour, masculinity and the idea of female virtue provides an interesting backdrop to the lack of action.
She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them
Short but deeply satisfying.