Death Foretold, Memento, and Name Interpretations

Ok, so I'm going to post another blog since I've been kind of blog-lazy recently.

So, I just finished my first Garcia Marquez book, Chronicle of Death Foretold, which is kind of embarassing being that I am half Colombian. But anyway, I am kind of unsure about how I feel about the book. As a whole, I can say I liked it, but when critiquing it page by page, it does seem kind of like a person's rambles. There were parts that just dragged on and seemed somewhat irrelevant to the plot, but then again, this was my first time reading it and I probably missed some of the the novel's motifs.

What I did like about, though, is how Garcia Marquez took one event (the murder of Santiago Nasar), which lasted only a few hours, and stretched it out to 120 pages. When I read the very first line in the book about how Santiago Nasar was to die, I naturally assumed that his death would come either a) eventually as the climax of the novel, or b) quickly in the introduction with the remainder of the story being void of death. But no, what Garcia Marquez accomplished is something I'm used to seeing in very well directed and though-out movies. He took a single event, and stretched into a whole story by showing it from multiple perspectives. He showed it from Santiago's, Bayardo's, Divina's, Pablo's/Pedro's, Cristo's, and Angela's viewpoints. All the meanwhile, Garcia Marquez utilizes an unnammed narrator to weave all the stories together.

In a way, this somewhat reminded me of the movie Memento, in which a man with no short term memory tries to puzzle his life together and in order to do so, he tattoos facts about his life on himself so that he doesn't forget. The movie moves non-chronologically through a single event - one full day. The beginning of the movie starts off with a death and the rest of the movie takes the reader through a series of pieced together events in order to understand the murder.

On a last, irrelevant note, I would like to point out the significance of certain names in Garcia Marquez's novel. Divina Flor, Cristo Bedoya, and Pedro and Pablo Vicario all have very interpretable names. Divina Flor, literally meaning Divine Flower in Spanish, could represent the innocence of the young women who were married off to older, promiscuous men in those times. Cristo, a shortened version of Cristobal, means Christ in Spanish. He is Santiago's true friend in the story and does everything in his power to stop the murder. The Vicario family's surname could be derived from the word vicarious, which means experiencing something through others. This makes sense because the twins had to defend their sister's honor and go to jail for her.