New Round of Book Ratings

Well it’s time to rate the last four books I have read.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – SMBR: 3.5
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Category: Fiction

The Undercover Economist – SMBR: 5
Author: Tim Harford
Category: Non-fiction

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – SMBR: 5
Author: Douglas Adams
Category: Fiction

The Great Gatsby – SMBR: 4
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Category: Fiction

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold

This is the story of Santiago Nasar who gets murdered by two brothers, Pablo Vicario and Pedro Vicario. It is narrated in the form of reconstructed events that must have taken place 27 years ago on the fateful day of the murder. The basis of the plot is that Angela Vicario is found not be a virgin on her wedding night, and after much interrogation by her brothers names Santiago Nasar to be her violator. So, to save the family honor the Vicario brothers decide to kill Santiago the next morning. The whole story is a sequence of events building up to the final murder and is narrated in a journalistic tone, and until the end of the book it is still unclear as to who took Angela’s virginity.

This was my fourth novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, after One Hundred Years of Solitude, Living to Tell the Tale, and Love in the Time of Cholera, and now I am convinced that one can find events happened in one book mentioned in any of the other three also. For example, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, a character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is mentioned in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the very plot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is mentioned as just one of many events in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Similarly, the source of many events in One Hundred Years of Solitude has actually come from the author’s own life, which you come to know by reading his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale.

Another thing which I have noticed in all these four books is the way the protagonist has been portrayed and to a certain extent all the characters as well. First of all, the protagonist would always lead an un-normal or a very eventful life, which would sometimes border on eccentricity, and this very eccentricity is what would add an air of solitariness about him. He would be some kind of an idealistic living in a world of his own though promiscuous yet vulnerable, and this vulnerability being most prominent than ever when he would die in the end.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold did not turn out to be as good a read as his other novels did but anyways, I still enjoyed reading it.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a five book series with the first book having the same name and the next four are:

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless

The entire book revolves around basically five characters: Arthur Dent, an Englishman; Ford Prefect, an alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, who is the roving researcher for the book ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and who escapes with Arthur the demolition of Earth by the Vogons; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the president of the Galaxy, who unknowingly saves Ford and Arthur from certain death by taking them aboard his stolen spaceship, the Heart of Gold; Trillan, Zaphod’s partner on the spaceship; and Marvin, the one-man crew of the spaceship, and who is always in a depression thinking that his great and unmatched mental powers are never put to the right use.

This is a science-fiction comedy about the adventures of these five characters all through the galaxy in and out of time and space.

In short, a thoroughly enjoyable and a refreshing read.

Au Revoir

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