Volume 30, Number 6 · April 14, 1983
Big Little Book
By Robert M. Adams
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Knopf, 120 pp., $10.95
The reputation of Gabriel García Márquez, which brought him the Nobel prize in 1982, stems very largely from the immense, seriocomic phantasmagoria of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Since that epic fantasy was published in 1970, Señor García Márquez has continued to ply his trade, bringing forth two shorter works of fiction (The Autumn of the Patriarch and In Evil Hour) as well as three collections of short stories. None, however, has come close to making the same sort of impression as the original novel; and quite a few of the short stories are frankly published as pulled from the writer's files—they are works of as much as thirty years ago. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a small book, hardly more than a novella (as Henry James would call it), but in no sense is it minor work. Without rehashing materials used before, it harks back again and again to the grand ironies and sinuous fantasy of the big novel, adapting them to a narrow scene and limited time scale. It feels, to a remarkable degree, heavy and strong.
Review, 1804 words
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