On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five -thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.”He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero. his mother, told me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant Monday. ( Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
We are all inconsistent. We are all surrounded by indeterminacies of every shape and size. The daily is riddled with the absurd. Marquez takes the age old form of the chronicle and reveals how far our lives depart from any linear, prescribed path of ‘purpose.’
His protagonist Santiago Nasar is killed and resurrected within the opening line of this short and dazzlingly brilliant novel. Such a line offers the reader a promise of murder that has to be fulfilled and this need for consummation through death, saturates the whole narrative with a sense of inevitability and grotesque fatalism.
‘Santiago, my son,’ she shouted to him, ‘what has happened to you? ‘
‘They’ve killed me, Wene Child,’ he said.
I love the ironic naturalism of the narrative and the way that Marquez manages to combine the uncanny with the banal. The inexorable appproach of death in the narrative is mysterious, comic and absurd. The longer the narrative goes on, the less anyone seems to know.
Rather like our own predicament!