by Patrick Ogle
Chronicle of a Death Fortold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is, of course, masterfully written and I am not going to presume to CRITQUE a book by one of the world's greatest writers.
This is not Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch or The General in his Labyrinth. It is a brief book, novella length. It doesn't have the scope and it doesn't develop the characters in the same way his novels do.
Yet every bit of it makes you want to know more. It is the story that is compelling. This is probably true of his longer works but those, obviously, have more time to develop characters and make you feel for them. It isn't as if he doesn't do that here, for a shorter work he does sketch each character finely but you do not necessarily feel you KNOW them. Part of this is the number of characters introduced. Thinking on it, it is remarkable he created memorable characters in just a few pages for some of the characters. Other books I've found myself having to go back to remember WHO a character is.
"Wait...is Joe the mailman or the butler?" That is never the case in this book.
I finished this a few weeks ago (nearly a month) and I still feel like I've yet to digest it and this is another thing it has in common with the author's longer works.
Chronicle of a Death Fortold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is, of course, masterfully written and I am not going to presume to CRITQUE a book by one of the world's greatest writers.
This is not Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch or The General in his Labyrinth. It is a brief book, novella length. It doesn't have the scope and it doesn't develop the characters in the same way his novels do.
Yet every bit of it makes you want to know more. It is the story that is compelling. This is probably true of his longer works but those, obviously, have more time to develop characters and make you feel for them. It isn't as if he doesn't do that here, for a shorter work he does sketch each character finely but you do not necessarily feel you KNOW them. Part of this is the number of characters introduced. Thinking on it, it is remarkable he created memorable characters in just a few pages for some of the characters. Other books I've found myself having to go back to remember WHO a character is.
"Wait...is Joe the mailman or the butler?" That is never the case in this book.
I finished this a few weeks ago (nearly a month) and I still feel like I've yet to digest it and this is another thing it has in common with the author's longer works.
RSS Feed