Chronicle of a Death Foretold | Plot Summary

Chronicle of a Death Foretold Overview

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is one of the author's shorter novels, but past and current critics agree that the book's small size hides a huge work of art. According to Jonathan Yardley in Washington Post Book World, the novel "is, in miniature, a virtuoso performance."

Chronicle of a Death Foretold relates the events leading up to and, to a lesser degree, following the murder of Santiago Nasar, a twenty-one-year-old Colombian of Arab descent. Nasar is killed by the Vicario brothers, who want to avenge the loss of their sister's honor. Told twenty-seven years after the crime by an unnamed narrator (arguably Garcia Marquez himself) who returns to the village where he once lived to put back together "the broken mirror of memory," the story is constructed from the fragmented and often conflicting versions of events as they are remembered by the townspeople and by the narrator himself.