"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for his short stories and novels, especially ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' which has magical vitality and a great abundance of remarkable characters and incidents. He is also known as the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. His new novel, ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold,'' which is very strange and brilliantly conceived, is a sort of metaphysical murder mystery in which the detective, Garcia Marquez himself, reconstructs …

…of the best and most powerfully rendered, superior even to the great, slow murder of Quilty in ''Lolita,'' or the sensational and bathetic murder of the German soldier in ''Mr. Sammler's Planet,'' or various murders in Camus, Sartre, Capote, Mailer and others. Flannery O'Connor's deftly stunning murders in ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' compete well against Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she too is a genius of the uncanny and the banal.