Chronicle of a Death Foretold

"I could have chosen the five books all by him because he was a genius! But I also had to talk about other Colombian writers. Crónica de una muerte anunciada is my favorite book by Gabriel García Márquez. I just love it. I read it when I was 13 or 14. It’s a book that as soon as I finished it I started reading again, and again, and again. I was obsessed with it. It truly made me want to become a writer. I said, ‘I want to write a book one day that will obsess a person like this book obsessed me.’ Since then, I’ve read it many, many times. I teach it in my workshops, I work with it. It’s a perfect novel. Every creative writing lesson that you want to give is in there: the narrator, the narrative times, the universe, the character development. I just loved it. And it’s a short novel, which is a very difficult genre. A big novel, you can sometimes write a vague paragraph, or a sentence that doesn’t quite work. But with a short novel, as with a short story, the whole thing has to be good. It is. Also, just like sometimes we can’t see nature because it’s everywhere, the same happens with violence. I used to be married to an Irish man. We arrived to live in Colombia and there were problems at the university that’s very near to my mother’s house where we were staying. He was Irish: he knew about bombs and violence, and the dangers of growing up in a country that’s torn by war. But there were these explosions, and he asked me, ‘What are those noises that I hear?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, those are bombs.’ And he said, ‘Bombs? Where?’ and I replied, ‘At the university.’ He asked, ‘Are engineering students doing experiments?’ And I replied, ‘No, the students are fighting the police.’ And he was astonished at how everyone carried on with their life as if nothing was happening. Violence is so ingrained in our daily life, that it’s also a big part of our literature. We have many stories about violence. Since my books have been getting published outside of Colombia—and especially in other languages—I’ve been asked why I don’t write about the war. I do not talk about the Colombian war in my books but I do look at other types of violence, perhaps more subtle types of violence that happen in our everyday lives, but we don’t notice them or we don’t talk about them because there is such bloody violence out there from the war that that’s the focus of all our attention. Yes, he slept with a virgin who was going to marry another guy. She gets discovered because when she gets married, her husband finds out she’s not a virgin. Her new husband takes her back to her home and says, ‘Thank you, I don’t want this lady. She’s of no use to me, because she’s not a virgin.’ They look for who to blame for deflowering her and her brothers kill him. This is a story from the past, in a small town. This is not modern Colombia. But there is lots of violence against women in this country. It was evident before, but it became even more evident with the pandemic. The struggle is there and it’s real. You can read Crónica de una muerte anunciada and feel it’s not that old because it’s still happening in some ways. Not like that. Women, perhaps, are not sent back to their homes if they marry and turn out not be virgins. But there’s lots of violence against women. The unsafest place for a woman in Colombia is in her own home. So that’s a problem."