Book Project:
This book project will be as an introduction to the book, which I have approved for the assignment. It should be on a play or novel—most important and/or most recent—by an author from the list provided and/or referenced to. It should be approximately two-three typed pages (double space), using MLA format and works cited. Write in complete sentences, and check your spelling, grammar, construction, expression, and organization. Number/label your headings. You can also use multimedia or PowerPoint presentation.
1. A short introductory paragraph about the book, including MLA documentation of the book and a few general statements about the book’s content, style, and worth.
2. Author’s background–date of birth/death, something about the author’s life, particularly young life, and any events in the author’s life, which are relevant to the book. Also include the other works the author has written.
3. Background to the book–historical/cultural/political. Include any background information, which will add to the reader’s understanding of the book. For this section, you can use both historical documents and literary criticism.
4. Content of the book–a short synopsis of the plot. Also include any themes or motifs that run through the book. Here you would refer to anything unique or unusual in the writing style or subject matter.
5. Your analysis–your opinion on the importance of the book to the reader, not merely whether or not you like it or not, but your own understanding, backed by examples from the book, why the book is a significant literary work.
This book project will be as an introduction to the book, which I have approved for the assignment. It should be on a play or novel—most important and/or most recent—by an author from the list provided and/or referenced to. It should be approximately two-three typed pages (double space), using MLA format and works cited. Write in complete sentences, and check your spelling, grammar, construction, expression, and organization. Number/label your headings. You can also use multimedia or PowerPoint presentation.
1. A short introductory paragraph about the book, including MLA documentation of the book and a few general statements about the book’s content, style, and worth.
2. Author’s background–date of birth/death, something about the author’s life, particularly young life, and any events in the author’s life, which are relevant to the book. Also include the other works the author has written.
3. Background to the book–historical/cultural/political. Include any background information, which will add to the reader’s understanding of the book. For this section, you can use both historical documents and literary criticism.
4. Content of the book–a short synopsis of the plot. Also include any themes or motifs that run through the book. Here you would refer to anything unique or unusual in the writing style or subject matter.
5. Your analysis–your opinion on the importance of the book to the reader, not merely whether or not you like it or not, but your own understanding, backed by examples from the book, why the book is a significant literary work.
A Disturbing, Disquieting Death
Sex and virginity, revenge and forgiveness encompass the why and more importantly the why not of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Almost everyone in the town knew that the Vicario twin brothers were going to kill Santiago Nassar, the wealthy, aristocratic Arab for the heinous crime of theft, robbing their sister Angela of her virginity, shaming the family of the good fortune of her famous, wealthy husband, Bayardo San Roman. Marques structures the novel through a friend’s investigation twenty years later with crisp detail, grotesque yet fascinating. This riveting tale involves no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, and no real answer. The reader is left fascinated, befuddled, and questioning the whole nature of the dead man’s reality from beginning to end.
García Márquez was born March 6, 1927 Aracataca, Colombia, which was one hundred miles inland where he lived until he was nine years old. There he witnessed atrocious acts of pure, unadulterated violence. Marquez recalls: “The weekends were a regular fiesta he we virtually locked ourselves in houses. On Mondays, there were literally corpses and wounded people in the street” (Maurya 58). His grandfather was a famous colonel in the War of a Thousand Days and often shared war stories. His mother’s mother and sisters “fed him on a steady and disquieting diet of folk tales, ghost stories, and legends of the supernatural” (Maurya 54). According to the Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez moved in with his stranger parents at 8 years old, his father being an apothecary who eventually settled in Bogata. During national violence that erupted while he was studying at National University, he moved to the coast city of Cartagena . This may explain why Marquez is known for his magical realism, a blend of Faulkner-like regionalism with a touch of the surreal. René Buch, Artistic Director of Repertorio Español, believes in magic realism: "If you go to Latin America," he says, "you believe that someone can levitate. That's why Hispanic art is called 'magical realism.' It's Don Quixote. It's in our genes” (Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Marquez says, “Faulkner got us… to think of the Caribbean not as a geographical region surrounded by its sea but as a much wider historical and cultural belt stretching from the north of Brazil to the Mississippi Basin” (Marquez, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton”). He is famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, his short story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,“ and his famous essay, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton,” where he compared President Clinton to Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter where “Puritanism is insatiable and feeds on its own excrement” (Marquez, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton”). He is also known, of course, for his 1982 Nobel Prize in literature and his friendship with Fidel Castro.
According to Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story is based on actual events of a similar plot line. Marquez says, I wrote in the first person, for the first time. So what happened was that after thirty years I discovered something we novelists tend to forget–the best literary formula is always the truth” (Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). What he wanted to know was why did everyone in the town know that the victim was going to die but the victim himself, and why did not anyone stop the murder. According to Vergara in his essay “Haunting Demons,” the wealthy Indian virgin stealer was a “sacrificial lamb” who had to die in order for the society’s members to move on. In essence, young, swarthy Arab party boy Santiago Nassar must pay with his life, must be hashed to death with everyone’s knowledge just as Christ suffered on the cross. Vergara goes on to say that both men die at a time of “decadent values” because there were massive parties preceding the death event. Only, in this case, Santiago Nasser did not know and Jesus’s mother didn’t slam the door to preclude his safe return. Just as Jesus, Nasser had a stab wound like stigmata of the Christ (Vergara). The original story, according to the Reperterio Espaniol, involved a man named Guatono Gentile, an Italian man, who supposedly deflowered one Margarita Salas, whose fisherman brothers were outraged that she was returned (Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). They decided to kill him savagely by degutting him, even as he walked with guts hanging out.
Man woos virgin wife, virgin wife is not a virgin, he returns wife, and brothers go kill the named perpetrator. By trade, Marquez was a reporter and the novel clearly pursues this de facto narration of memory. Some remember with vivid detail, while others hide the truth for their own mental sanity. Marquez pursues the theme of “personal versus individual responsibility,” which makes the novel a frighteningly complex investigation of the base facets of our humanity (Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). It is this idea of the collective irresponsibility that is most disturbing. The bright side of this is that there is the Good Samaritan in the character of Cristo Belaya, but he, unfortunately, is delayed four crucial minutes in an act of service for a dying elderly man. Thus, he is absolved, though he acted too late. Because of the first person narration, the reader trusts the narrator, who seems to be giving both sides of the story in search of truth--fair and balanced, though we sometimes forget that the narrator was a friend of Nasser’s , so we never really know his true motives for wanting the back story.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, his first foray into first person, the narrator makes the reader understand how death is sometimes inevitable even in the best of circumstances. Marquez makes you feel as if you yourself are trying to hold in your gut as you scramble for solace. Such is the power of Marquez texts that is easy to believe that he has witnessed bludgeoning all his life. He tells the story as from a child’s point of view, always asking questions…why? Why? But no one has the answers. We, as readers, get different points of view. For instance, Angelo, in an interview 25 years later refused to get her rich husband drunk , so she could stain her sheet with Mercurochrome and “give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity“ simply because “it was all something dirt that shouldn‘t be dome to anybody“ (91). Though she subjected herself to “the African tool” (95). It was at this point in the novel the reader begins to realize the hypocrisy of sex. The narrator relays his sexual escapades with a mulatto Madame and her ladies of pleasure. Shortly after Nasser’s body was butchered, she, Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, almost had a sexual dalliance with him but stopped short because he “smell[ed] of him” (78). After all, Nasser was her lover until his father found out. So, there’s a weave within a weave, and the judge is convinced that Nasser acted so innocent because he attended the wedding feast; he sang merry songs in a drunken state with the narrator and his brother wishing the new bride and husband a happy marriage. The narrator informs us ”…no one ever believed it had really been Santiago Nasser because…no one had ever seen them together, much less alone together” (898-90). So, we are left wondering at the end why even his mother, Placido Linero, barred the door as they gave him “ a horizontal slash o his stomach and all his intestines exploded out until he saw his viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees” (119). Everyone in the town shared in the blame but only Nasser took the responsibility. Life is not fair.
Works Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "The Mysteries of Bill Clinton." Editorial. New York Times Special Features 1 Feb. 1999. Salon Newsreal. 1 Feb. 1999. 5 July 2008.
Maurya, Vibha. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez." Social Scientist 11.1 (Jan. 1983):
53-58. JSTOR. ECU J.Y. Joyner Library, Greenville, NC. 12 July 2008. Vergara, Isabel Rodriguez. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Menippean Satire ." Critical Essays on the Works of Gabriel García Márquez. By Isabel Rodriguez Vergaro. 1998. N. pag. Biblioteca Digital del Portal Educativo de las Américas. Vers. 64. INTERAMER. 12 July 2008.
Sex and virginity, revenge and forgiveness encompass the why and more importantly the why not of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Almost everyone in the town knew that the Vicario twin brothers were going to kill Santiago Nassar, the wealthy, aristocratic Arab for the heinous crime of theft, robbing their sister Angela of her virginity, shaming the family of the good fortune of her famous, wealthy husband, Bayardo San Roman. Marques structures the novel through a friend’s investigation twenty years later with crisp detail, grotesque yet fascinating. This riveting tale involves no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, and no real answer. The reader is left fascinated, befuddled, and questioning the whole nature of the dead man’s reality from beginning to end.
García Márquez was born March 6, 1927 Aracataca, Colombia, which was one hundred miles inland where he lived until he was nine years old. There he witnessed atrocious acts of pure, unadulterated violence. Marquez recalls: “The weekends were a regular fiesta he we virtually locked ourselves in houses. On Mondays, there were literally corpses and wounded people in the street” (Maurya 58). His grandfather was a famous colonel in the War of a Thousand Days and often shared war stories. His mother’s mother and sisters “fed him on a steady and disquieting diet of folk tales, ghost stories, and legends of the supernatural” (Maurya 54). According to the Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez moved in with his stranger parents at 8 years old, his father being an apothecary who eventually settled in Bogata. During national violence that erupted while he was studying at National University, he moved to the coast city of Cartagena . This may explain why Marquez is known for his magical realism, a blend of Faulkner-like regionalism with a touch of the surreal. René Buch, Artistic Director of Repertorio Español, believes in magic realism: "If you go to Latin America," he says, "you believe that someone can levitate. That's why Hispanic art is called 'magical realism.' It's Don Quixote. It's in our genes” (Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Marquez says, “Faulkner got us… to think of the Caribbean not as a geographical region surrounded by its sea but as a much wider historical and cultural belt stretching from the north of Brazil to the Mississippi Basin” (Marquez, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton”). He is famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, his short story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,“ and his famous essay, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton,” where he compared President Clinton to Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter where “Puritanism is insatiable and feeds on its own excrement” (Marquez, “The Mysteries of Bill Clinton”). He is also known, of course, for his 1982 Nobel Prize in literature and his friendship with Fidel Castro.
According to Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story is based on actual events of a similar plot line. Marquez says, I wrote in the first person, for the first time. So what happened was that after thirty years I discovered something we novelists tend to forget–the best literary formula is always the truth” (Repertorio Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). What he wanted to know was why did everyone in the town know that the victim was going to die but the victim himself, and why did not anyone stop the murder. According to Vergara in his essay “Haunting Demons,” the wealthy Indian virgin stealer was a “sacrificial lamb” who had to die in order for the society’s members to move on. In essence, young, swarthy Arab party boy Santiago Nassar must pay with his life, must be hashed to death with everyone’s knowledge just as Christ suffered on the cross. Vergara goes on to say that both men die at a time of “decadent values” because there were massive parties preceding the death event. Only, in this case, Santiago Nasser did not know and Jesus’s mother didn’t slam the door to preclude his safe return. Just as Jesus, Nasser had a stab wound like stigmata of the Christ (Vergara). The original story, according to the Reperterio Espaniol, involved a man named Guatono Gentile, an Italian man, who supposedly deflowered one Margarita Salas, whose fisherman brothers were outraged that she was returned (Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). They decided to kill him savagely by degutting him, even as he walked with guts hanging out.
Man woos virgin wife, virgin wife is not a virgin, he returns wife, and brothers go kill the named perpetrator. By trade, Marquez was a reporter and the novel clearly pursues this de facto narration of memory. Some remember with vivid detail, while others hide the truth for their own mental sanity. Marquez pursues the theme of “personal versus individual responsibility,” which makes the novel a frighteningly complex investigation of the base facets of our humanity (Espaniol Study Guide for Chronicle of a Death Foretold). It is this idea of the collective irresponsibility that is most disturbing. The bright side of this is that there is the Good Samaritan in the character of Cristo Belaya, but he, unfortunately, is delayed four crucial minutes in an act of service for a dying elderly man. Thus, he is absolved, though he acted too late. Because of the first person narration, the reader trusts the narrator, who seems to be giving both sides of the story in search of truth--fair and balanced, though we sometimes forget that the narrator was a friend of Nasser’s , so we never really know his true motives for wanting the back story.
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, his first foray into first person, the narrator makes the reader understand how death is sometimes inevitable even in the best of circumstances. Marquez makes you feel as if you yourself are trying to hold in your gut as you scramble for solace. Such is the power of Marquez texts that is easy to believe that he has witnessed bludgeoning all his life. He tells the story as from a child’s point of view, always asking questions…why? Why? But no one has the answers. We, as readers, get different points of view. For instance, Angelo, in an interview 25 years later refused to get her rich husband drunk , so she could stain her sheet with Mercurochrome and “give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity“ simply because “it was all something dirt that shouldn‘t be dome to anybody“ (91). Though she subjected herself to “the African tool” (95). It was at this point in the novel the reader begins to realize the hypocrisy of sex. The narrator relays his sexual escapades with a mulatto Madame and her ladies of pleasure. Shortly after Nasser’s body was butchered, she, Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, almost had a sexual dalliance with him but stopped short because he “smell[ed] of him” (78). After all, Nasser was her lover until his father found out. So, there’s a weave within a weave, and the judge is convinced that Nasser acted so innocent because he attended the wedding feast; he sang merry songs in a drunken state with the narrator and his brother wishing the new bride and husband a happy marriage. The narrator informs us ”…no one ever believed it had really been Santiago Nasser because…no one had ever seen them together, much less alone together” (898-90). So, we are left wondering at the end why even his mother, Placido Linero, barred the door as they gave him “ a horizontal slash o his stomach and all his intestines exploded out until he saw his viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees” (119). Everyone in the town shared in the blame but only Nasser took the responsibility. Life is not fair.
Works Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "The Mysteries of Bill Clinton." Editorial. New York Times Special Features 1 Feb. 1999. Salon Newsreal. 1 Feb. 1999. 5 July 2008
Maurya, Vibha. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez." Social Scientist 11.1 (Jan. 1983):
53-58. JSTOR. ECU J.Y. Joyner Library, Greenville, NC. 12 July 2008. Vergara, Isabel Rodriguez. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Menippean Satire ." Critical Essays on the Works of Gabriel García Márquez. By Isabel Rodriguez Vergaro. 1998. N. pag. Biblioteca Digital del Portal Educativo de las Américas. Vers. 64. INTERAMER. 12 July 2008
