A quasi-police description of the events leading up to, then long preceding, an honor-killing of one Santiago. The style strikes me as vastly simpler and less magically-realistic than The Autumn of the Patriarch, and much shorter. An inversion of detective mysteries: it is agreed by all who the proximate killer is, and the mystery centers on the how & whydunnit. (Borges would approve.)

As the witnesses and reports pile up, it seems to become clear that it's all a farcical assemblage of bad luck, buck-passing, murderous traditional cultures of machismo, and accident, but doubt is cast from the beginning - the murder happened on a beautiful clear day, which in the village's memory has become a dark rainy day; witnesses crowd around the magistrate eager to tell their involvement and exaggerate their part ("...the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, everyone eager to show off his own important role in the drama..."); and the basis for the murder itself was likely a lie. This uncertainty renders the story sinister by the end - did the village conspire to kill Santiago? Did he anger everyone in a way we are not told of, because to provide a motive would confirm their guilt, and they collectively fail to help him, explaining the repeated slurs like '"He thought that his money made him untouchable," he told me. Fausta Lopez, his wife, commented: "Just like all Turks."'? (A nice example of cunctation: the mayor stop in to check on a dominos match so and is too late to take away the murder-weapons.) How much is Angela responsible for failing to respect the charade of virginity and deliberately sabotaging her marriage? (She is ultimately punished by the deliciously cruel method of returning 20 years of love-letters, unopened.) The assembled villagers in the square shout advice at the last second, but somehow, their exhortations serve only to confuse him and maneuver him towards his killers; the killers are made to remark their knives are rather clean given they're killing someone. And so on.

The more we read, the less we feel we know and the more worried we become that we're being fed a pack of distortions and warped memories in which the events were far more dramatic and complicated than they actually were. The magistrate warns us that "Give [someone] a prejudice and [they] will move the world", and the narrator remarks of one post hoc explanation that "It seemed to be such an easy truth that the investigator wrote it down...", and "fatality makes us invisible" - or is it plot necessity that makes the victim invisible? The villagers know their stories must terminate in the death of the victim, and in the stories they confabulate, he must be invisible to have performed the actions ascribed to him. (Umineko no Naku Koro ni's vocabulary is useful here: outside the cat box, it is known that Santiago was killed by two knife-wielding twins at such a time and place; but everything else before that is part of the cat box and can be endlessly revised.) But each story, however plausible in the singular, has a hard time surviving conjunction with all the other tales being peddled ("he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature"). And their story can always be continued by imagining or forcing consequences:

For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren't doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate....Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren't bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis, and one day, unable to stand it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar's fiancee, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm of the bladder when she heard the news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la Flor, Clotilde Armenta's good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eighty-six, got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the locked door of his own house, and he didn't survive the shock. Plácida Linero had locked that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. "I locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she'd seen my son come in," she told me, "and it wasn't true." On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper cress seeds.

I am reminded of an old story:

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a 2nd one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."

People do not live in facts, they live in stories; and as long as the story continues, they are satisfied.

Everything has been brought to light, it seems, but nothing has been enlightened. By the end, the death has been foretold but remains unknown.