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mynameisnemo 's review for:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Gabriel García Márquez
I've been meaning to read Gabriel García Márquez for a long time but kept hoping that my Spanish would be good enough to allow me to read in the original language. Unfortunately I don't keep up with my studies enough to do that so I finally gave up and read in English.
This is kind of an odd book, not what I was expecting although I don't know what I was expecting. It is exactly what the title says it is but at the same time it's a window into a small town in Colombia and the culture of it. In some ways it reminded me a lot of Steinbeck's The Pearl, in the kind of almost inevitable feel of the events unfolding, as though there is no other way for them to unfold.
I generally don't like anything written from first person perspective, and while this book wasn't as annoying as I usually find such works, it did kind of bother me that we don't find out more about the narrator. Where was he when the events were unfolding? What was he doing? We know about everyone else in the town but not him.
Beyond that, it was an easy read, and obviously very short, but not exactly gripping and even more, I don't really feel like I learned anything from it, either in terms of actual knowledge like history or science or culture, or even anything about how to craft a story. Maybe something gets lost in the translation or perhaps it's not the best of Máquez's stories to start with. Hopefully not all of his works are as uninspiring as this one.
This is kind of an odd book, not what I was expecting although I don't know what I was expecting. It is exactly what the title says it is but at the same time it's a window into a small town in Colombia and the culture of it. In some ways it reminded me a lot of Steinbeck's The Pearl, in the kind of almost inevitable feel of the events unfolding, as though there is no other way for them to unfold.
I generally don't like anything written from first person perspective, and while this book wasn't as annoying as I usually find such works, it did kind of bother me that we don't find out more about the narrator. Where was he when the events were unfolding? What was he doing? We know about everyone else in the town but not him.
Beyond that, it was an easy read, and obviously very short, but not exactly gripping and even more, I don't really feel like I learned anything from it, either in terms of actual knowledge like history or science or culture, or even anything about how to craft a story. Maybe something gets lost in the translation or perhaps it's not the best of Máquez's stories to start with. Hopefully not all of his works are as uninspiring as this one.