A few weeks ago I was about to order a few books from an on-line store for the single reason they're cheaper that way. Above a certain, yet still reasonable value, you even get free delivery, so I had to choose an extra book, and I chose 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' by Gabriel García Márquez. It's a novella printed on slightly more than a hundred pages, and as such, a curiously expensive one, but I was still pleased after reading.
It's really a coincidence, but I bought a book which has some relations to 'The Lottery'. At the first glance, the two protagonists' death have nothing to do with each other: Santiago Nasar's deliberate murder is preceded by a dozen of unlucky coincidences, and happens even though no-one actually wants him dead. However, the latter is the first faint similarity to 'The Lottery'. According to the plot, a wife is brought back from the wedding bed by her husband for she turned out not to be a virgin (while she was supposed to be and pretended to be one), and so her brothers are to retrieve the family's honour by killing the man who is said responsible. The brothers do their very best to make people stop them, so by simply trying to take revenge, they'd retrieve the honour of their family. They tell everyone what are they up to and they prowl around with butcher knives all the morning, but all they achieve is that a policeman confiscates their knives and sends them home. Well, they do, fetching two other knives and eventually ending up actually butchering Santiago. Those few attempts to warn him are so faint that he (and also the only friend who tries to save him) gets the first warning in the last minutes.
All the primary reasons of his death are related a bit to Tessie's death in 'The Lottery'. It's a murder for tradidion with no real importance about whether the victim is guilty, and the people are not concerned too much. It's true however, that we can't sense any satisfaction of instincts in the murder this time, but we shouldn't forget the brothers are butchers by profession.
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