Monday 11 March 2019

chronicle of a death foretold [márquez, tr gregory rabassa]

Having read the book in a day, which is not hard to, and having then been trapped in a mosquito net of sleeplessness, I pondered what Márquez’s novel was really about. Pondered and decided it had to do with the random stupidity of violence and of codes of violence. Márquez writes with the voice of one who is investigating a crime which took place in the past, at least twenty years ago. The fate of Santiago Nasser is conveyed with a detached tone. One that renders the violence, as it is conveyed twice towards the end of the book, all the more shocking. Márquez first offers a surgical description of the autopsy, in all its gory detail, and then repeats the account of the knife thrusts themselves when describing the murder within the book’s narrative. Each time, the violence jars, renting asunder the placid tone of the novel, just as the supposed act rent asunder the placid tone of the small Caribbean town where the murder occurred. The description brought to mind Bolaño’s chapter on the Killings in 2666. 

There is, no doubt, something masterly in the author’s handling of his material. At the same time, it’s perhaps hard to read without a smidgeon of concern for the way it presents its world as something out of the old testament. An approach to the presentation of ‘world’ literature that can also be seen in the work of many authors whose work has become successful in those parts of the world which generate revenue streams. Perhaps it might be said that the author is helping to construct the mythical bedrock of a still youthful country. That this work will indeed become, one day, part of the old testament of his nation’s literature. 

An alternative POV: The novel, which by the middle of the twentieth century had become a hideout for the middle classes, the literary classes, or else for tales of remarkable endeavour, is returned by Márquez to the people. He drags it back to the world of Chaucer or Lazarillo de Tormes: a space to recount the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. And in so doing he helped to democratise an art form that had become beached on the shore of the literati. 

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