It has often been the lot of religious heroes to have their legacies poked, prodded and squeezed to fit the cultural, psychological and political agendas of more modern times. Catherine Tekakwitha, the unofficial saint of Kahnawake, has been positioned by American Catholics as an icon of nationalism, appropriated by environmentalists as a patroness of ecological values, drawn in storybooks to suit antiquated notions of little Indians frolicking in wooded glades, and even avoided by Canadian First Nations groups seeking to redress an oppressive history of Catholic assimilation. In Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Allan Greer cuts through these obscuring accretions to find the person behind the folklore, whose short life inspired the unexpected devotion of two French Jesuits and their unlikely quest to canonize her--a woman who, in her appearance, her language and her way of life, remained to the end a Mohawk.

Instead of chronicling the sweeping movements of empires, Greer embroiders an intricate microhistory from the strands of three lives coming from two different worlds, in order to "challenge prevailing views of Iroquois history, particularly on the subject of conversion to Christianity." He crafts a masterful story using a historiographical approach that combines intensive analysis of hagiographies about Catherine's life with a detailed examination of the influences, beliefs and motivations that shaped the inner worlds of his two Jesuits: Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec. Greer knits together archaeological and ethnographic evidence to reconstruct the hybrid cultural environment which distinguished the French-Iroquois contact zone after the peace of 1667, an area that fringed Lake Ontario and reached eastwards as far as Lake Champlain and Montreal.

Mainstream European accounts of missionary encounters have tended to treat North American Natives "primarily as the objects of apostolic attention," rather than as autonomous actors on their own spiritual journey to Christianity. Saint Francis Xavier's crusades among savages in the East Indies established this standard for French Jesuits like Claude Chauchetière, who studied the saint's letters while preparing for his own life of service. Greer's careful rendering debunks these myths and demonstrates that the old concept of conversion offers an insufficient framework for understanding the multifaceted aspects of what went on in Kahnawake. The Jesuits certainly did not "convert" Catherine: she learned Christianity mainly through contact with other Iroquois Christians and sought to circumvent the French priestly monopoly to gain more direct access to Christian mysteries. Neither could the actions of one young Iroquois woman alone "convert" Jesuits brought up within a male-dominated European society and hardened by years of religious training. The mental transformation that allowed them to see reflections of themselves in this Mohawk woman, this "other," came not merely from observing her, but from a predisposition as Jesuits to adapt to different cultures, from their literary battles with the imperatives of Catholic sacred biography, and from the unique cultural milieu in which their encounter took place.

Greer begins by dispelling any doubts that Catherine Tekakwitha was, in every conceivable way, a Mohawk. He describes her Algonquin mother's abduction into Mohawk society, Catherine's early life in Gandaouagué, her baptism by the resident Jesuit and the social and economic processes to which she was inseparably bound. Particularly revealing is Greer's long dissection of the crafts and other women's work that Catherine engaged in, although a diagram or two would have helped the reader visualize the objects he describes.

An essential aspect of Catherine's character came from the syncretic Iroquois culture. The Iroquois absorbed cultural elements of other peoples as part of living alliance relationships that went beyond simple peace treaties. It is within this context that the idea of Catherine's "conversion" breaks down. Adopting Catholicism from the French was very much an Iroquois thing to do, "in order to partake of what their allies presented as a central element of their identity." Furthermore, Catherine sought to bypass French priests in seeking deeper experiences of Christianity through asceticism, by severe penance and by creating her own Native convent in secret defiance of the patriarchal establishment. By infusing her new belief with the fruits of her Iroquois roots, Catherine went beyond a simple adherence to standard missionary fare to develop her own brand of do-it-yourself Christianity where she was ultimately in control.

Francis Xavier, with Portuguese power at his back, had been happy to force baptism on Natives and accept the smashing of idols in place of more meaningful expressions of faith. But as Greer writes elsewhere, other Jesuits in India and China found ways to "infiltrate" the civilizations they lived in, to adopt their languages and cultural attributes to be accepted more easily, and to adapt by compromising on certain points of doctrine and ritual. In New France--where the alliance basis of French-Iroquois relations prevented European cultural practices from dominating Indian ones--Chauchetière and Cholenec were able to recognize aspects of Iroquois culture in Catherine's fervent devotion that matched their mental patterns of what Christian saintliness meant.

Yet Chauchetière's and Cholenec's transformation did not result from merely observing Catherine Tekakwitha's life. Equally important were their literary crusades against the embedded cultural prejudices in Catholic thinking, which they faced in seeking sainthood for Catherine. "[A] saint was not really a saint," writes Greer, "without a vita sanctorum," a sacred biography, and both Chauchetière and Cholenec set out to provide one. Struggling to make Catherine conform to hagiographic stock plots forced the two Jesuits to wrestle with her example and to separate, in their own minds, European cultural norms from the heroism that was at the core of their faith. Chauchetière, the more creative, idealistic and unstable of the two, produced a broad portrait that covered the healing miracles attributed to Catherine, her austere way of life, her charity, industry and strength of character, as well as that "certain ineffable holy quality" he had seen in her and that he believed had cured his own tortured soul. Chauchetière, says Greer, struggles on almost every page of his biography "to overcome his own lingering sense that the terms 'holy' and 'Indian' belonged to separate, incommensurable universes." But Cholenec, whose seasoned mind was both more cautious than his younger colleague's and more sensitive to the attitudes of European Catholics, shaped his account of Catherine's saintly behaviour to fit the more conventional theme of celibacy--an aspect of Catherine's life that, if true, was idiosyncratic among Iroquois. Knowing that an Indian virgin was unlikely to be convincing to his audience, Cholenec attempted to fix the facts around the policy. He turned a probably non-existent vow of celibacy into a historical record and used a story of cannibalistic acts by one of Catherine's friends to separate Tekakwitha from the savagery associated with her people. Even though she was Mohawk on the outside, Cholenec was trying to say, she was really a saint.

If such a dramatic revolution in cultural understanding was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in Kahnawake. This Christian Iroquois settlement, situated on the south bank of the St. Lawrence just upriver from Montreal, was a hybrid town born out of the uncoordinated northward migration of Iroquois as they responded peacefully to the French colonization of Montreal. Even within the syncretic Iroquois culture, Kahnawake was an extreme example of "the Indians' Middle Ground." For Catherine and the Mohawks, Greer explains, they had to "find a way of adjusting to the expectations of the [French] ambient society without melting into it." For the Jesuits, this required heightened scrutiny of their new environment to determine "what came from God and what did not." At least as much as the Mohawks, the Jesuits were "making the best of situations they neither created nor fully understood."

The process of transformation, then, was too complex and multifaceted to be captured within traditional, one-way notions of conversion. Throughout Mohawk Saint, Allan Greer makes the compelling case that instead of a contest of cultures, "[t]he language of 'layering' and 'interpenetration' or...the 'braiding' of cultures, better serves us." He also shows that our modern Western mindset is as different from that of 17th century European Jesuits as it is from the Natives they wrote about.

Yet to undertake such a complex thing in 200 tightly written pages is not an easy task and, almost inevitably, Greer's treatise begins to fray toward the end. The Epilogue muddies the pristine portrait that he has so painstakingly embellished. It takes the form of a travelogue through the various societies and groups dedicated to Catherine across the western United States. But the purpose of Mohawk Saint is to free the reader from the divergent political and cultural agendas that have encrusted the story of Catherine. Why, then, does Greer only introduce them to us in detail just moments before he leaves us alone with our thoughts?

Allan Greer's skill in reconstructing Catherine Tekakwitha as a historical person from hagiographic raw material, and extricating her from the tangle of legend, is extraordinary. His achievement becomes even more astonishing when we realize that within this compelling portrait of a complex woman only four sentences of her actual words appear, and that even these deathbed platitudes were probably invented for hagiographic purposes. But this also underscores the unfortunate fact that even with all the details of Greer's carefully crafted microhistory, he can still only tell us very little about what his main character actually thought and felt about the things she saw, the people she met and the events she lived through. "These are questions," he writes with a trace of sadness, "that no historian can answer."

Every night at 1:05 a.m. the last train departs London's Waterloo station on a 42-minute trek through the privileged communities of southwest London. In nine minutes it reaches Clapham, where in 1807 Evangelical Anglicans convinced Parliament to abolish the slave trade on moral grounds. Six minutes later the train arrives in Wimbledon, which has been a favourite retreat of the wealthy and powerful since Queen Elizabeth I made it fashionable. Today, Wimbledon is an enclave of expensive homes and tidy gardens where well-to-do professionals enjoy a short commute to the halls of Westminster and their offices in Knightsbridge.

When Susan Nathan, a middle-aged Jewish woman of Lithuanian and South African descent, left Wimbledon in 1999 to exercise her right of return to Israel, she took her liberal, south London sensibilities with her. Her book, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, examines the moral, social and political injustices suffered by the Arab citizens of Israel--the one million invisible Palestinians, who, because they live inside the state of Israel, are deprived of the international attention that their compatriots in the Occupied Territories have achieved during the two Intifadas. Susan Nathan exposes the abuses committed against Israeli Arabs in education, employment, land rights, public services, the military and the political system. Writing for a popular international audience, and Diaspora Jews in particular, she chronicles the transformation of her own attitudes from the idealized version of Zionism she grew up with to a more informed perspective which she gained by living in the Arab town of Tamra, in the western Galilee.

The author argues that whereas concrete walls separate Israel from the Occupied Territories, the Jews and Arabs in Israel are divided by a psychological barrier. She marshals a mountain of evidence to support her contention that Israel is an apartheid state, drawing on her South African heritage as a template. She shows--convincingly--how racism is knitted into the legal and political fabric of the country through Jewish control of the ideology taught in Arab schools, a constant grab for Arab-owned land through a legal framework that favours Jews, denial of basic infrastructure services to Arab areas and a refusal to employ Arabs in important state enterprises. By avoiding the visible elements of the racism that made South Africa infamous, such as separate washrooms for different races, Israel's domestic policies have eluded international scrutiny.

Nathan examines in detail the psychological effects of inequality to support her argument that the divide traumatizes both Arabs and Jews and perpetuates a cycle of fear and learned helplessness that paralyzes a search for solutions. For Israeli Arabs the result is hopelessness about the future, an eroded identity and a fading awareness of their own human rights. Arabs feel they have no reason to participate in their own state, and fragmented leadership makes it impossible for them to take any collective action. For Jews, fear and a herd instinct reinforce an exaggerated sense of victimhood which causes them to deny any responsibility for injustices toward Arabs. Nathan laments that Israeli Jews, now in a position of power, have forgotten what it is like to be the minority.

Susan Nathan's background as an HIV/AIDS counsellor sheds light on these issues and her attention to the human aspects of the difficult issues she describes lends freshness to the book, as do her vivid descriptions and accessible style. She is fearless in addressing controversial topics, such as the parallel between the Holocaust and the treatment of Arabs. But in most cases she does so with a level of sensitivity that most popular writing about Israel lacks, such as in discussing the role that the hijab plays in the self-esteem of young women and examining the psychological trauma that young Israeli soldiers must cope with in trying to enforce an illegal military occupation.

But The Other Side of Israel is as much a story of the disillusionment of a Diaspora Jew when faced with the realities of her promised land as it is a chronicle of injustices suffered by Palestinians. It is an intensely personal account that is heavily influenced by the perspectives Nathan brought with her to Israel.

Having one's romantic illusions about life shattered is a common experience for the generation of boys and girls who grew up in England in the 1950s. The children of post-war Britain awoke from their cradles to a conflicted childhood--an upbringing full of heroic stories of Churchill and empire on one hand, and shell-shocked parents and ration books on the other. As a child, Nathan filled this existential gap by inventing fantasies of the exotic places she discovered in the pages of National Geographic and developing a nostalgic, rose-coloured vision of Zionism in response to the muted anti-Semitism she encountered in English boarding schools. When she moved to Israel, Nathan chose to relive the epic journey of previous Jewish immigrants by spending six months in an immigrant absorption centre, instead of taking a more direct route to her new life in Tel Aviv. But her simplistic view of her Jewish homeland collapsed as soon as she came into contact with the reality of power relations between the Jews and Arabs in Israel.

She responded to this trauma by exchanging one set of illusions for another. The Other Side of Israel begins like a James Bond novel: Israel is a land populated by heroes and villains where it is impossible not to choose a side. She constructs a highly romantic view of Arab life and motivations around a novel archetype--Hajji, an Arab grandmother. Hajji's life transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary: her household skills are "miraculous" and her understanding of nature, reflected in her gardening, is "profound." And Hajji doesn't simply make a pot of coffee--she conducts a ritual of coffee-making that is practiced with reverence by all Palestinians. Nathan's romantic outlook causes her to expunge the seething anger felt by Palestinians and to refuse to concede any wrongdoing on the Arab side. This is refreshing for readers who are used to a Western media environment where the most common image of a Palestinian Arab is the keffiyeh-wrapped head of a terrorist or a teenager throwing stones. But when it comes to most of the Jews she meets, she is quick to lay blame.

Nathan reserves her most passionate criticism--and her weakest argument--for the Jewish left which claims to support peace with the Palestinians. For her, these Jewish parties and peace groups maintain the status quo by failing to address the real issue in the conflict--an inequality of rights between Jews and Arabs. They support the Arabs only as long as the identity of Israel as a Jewish state is not challenged. But in contrast to the impressive evidence provided elsewhere, she bases her attack on anecdotal observations of Jewish/Arab co-existence groups and the spoken words from a few Jews whom she has provoked.

She also jumps to unfounded conclusions about the motives of Israeli Jews. A female soldier who is particularly rough at a checkpoint brings to mind stories of female guards in Dachau. Left-wing groups exist only to make themselves feel better about the injustices their country inflicts and to maintain a democratic international image. When an Arab suggests that his people must consider their own faults before blaming Jews, she surmises that he has been "bought" by his employment on the nearby kibbutz. Susan Nathan's emotions are never very far from the surface, and in her critique of the Israeli left they finally get away from her.

Accusations of anti-Semitism resurfaced recently against some writers and academics with the angry criticism that greeted last year's paper--and the just-published book--by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the power of the "Israel Lobby" in American politics. As a Jew, Susan Nathan is immune to these charges, but given her extreme moral stance against Israeli policies it is no wonder that her book has received little response in America. In Britain both the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement reviewed the book, but no major American publication will touch it. Sales have also been weak on this side of the Atlantic: the original printing of 10,000 copies remains on North American bookstore shelves, while in Britain a paperback edition is selling at least reasonably well and the book is finding its greatest success in Scandinavia which may be due to more balanced opinions about the Middle East that I have heard prevail there. International editions have been published in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish and Finnish--and one is forthcoming in Arabic.

The American author John Updike wrote that a reviewer should never criticize an author for not achieving what she never attempted to do. Susan Nathan's book provides only one side of the Israeli Arab issue to be sure, but it is titled, after all, The Other Side of Israel. Susan Nathan attempted to give Israeli Arabs a voice, and she provided a forum for some of them to speak to the world through her personal interviews with them. It is a compassionate, intelligent voice, one that we are not used to hearing in the West. And although The Other Side of Israel may not earn her many friends in the mainstream American media, it is a fresh and candid addition to the literature on the domestic aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

With Da Vinci mania sweeping the Western world like a wizard on a Firebolt, there could hardly have been a more lucrative time for a public printing of The Gospel of Judas.

The Gospel of Judas is not a modern story written for shock value, but a newly-restored ancient text that provides an alternate (to say the least!) view of the teachings of Christ. The premise is that Judas wasn't a bad guy after all: he was part of a divine plan for Jesus to be sacrificed, aided and abetted by Jesus Himself.

Before the current manuscript was unearthed, our deepest knowledge of The Gospel of Judas came from 1800-year-old critiques of this rogue text by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. Irenaeus was one of the central early Christian apologists whose primary claim to greatness was his attempt to establish a single, canonical Christian text. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John owe their prominence and general acceptance largely to the efforts of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus criticizes Gnostic authors who "declare that Judas the traitor... alone knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fabricated work to this effect, which they entitle the Gospel of Judas."

The New York Review of Books is running a review of The Gospel of Judas this week, entitled The Betrayer's Gospel. The review provides an engaging overview of the discovery and content of the manuscript, its politics, and its relationship to Gnosticism and the Christianity that we know.

Read it, and resist the impulse to declare a new conspiracy theory that might make gazillions of dollars for some opportunistic scholar.

I have just come across a fascinating review from the 2 April edition of the New York Times Book Review, about EARTHLY POWERS: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe From the French Revolution to the Great War, by Michael Burleigh.

The book explores the decline of religion in Europe during the 19th century, the consequence of which was total war in the 20th. But the review by Mark Lilla, Godless Europe, is itself worth the price of a book.

Here is an excerpt:

Among the many stories Europeans tell about themselves, none is more tenacious than the legend of Europe's secularization. It goes something like this. After many dark centuries of cultural backwardness and political tyranny sanctified by Roman Catholicism, followed by a period of maniacal confessional conflict set off by the Protestant Reformation, Europe in the 17th century began a slow but steady exit from religion. By the 18th century the leading lights of the Enlightenment had issued a public declaration of independence from God and his priests, which then became a battle plan for the war of attrition against religion that began with the French Revolution.

The outcome of this conflict was settled from the start, and already in the early 19th century the center of gravity in European life had shifted from problems of faith to those of class, industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and colonialism. The "long" 19th century, from the French Revolution to World War I, culminated in a crisis involving all these new factors, and the result was total war in the 20th. After this catastrophe, Europe was divided geographically and ideologically, but still unified in believing that the challenge of religion was over. Since World War II, Europeans have stared in blank amazement across the Atlantic at a new global power whose citizens and even leaders seem to believe myths about the old bearded man in the sky. They call this American "exceptionalism," on the assumption that living without God is the ultimate destiny of the human race.

Things change. Today we can be forgiven for thinking that Europe, not the United States, is the exception. Wherever we now cast our gaze around the globe, we are met with the spectacle of individuals and whole cultures set spiritually ablaze, and eager to spread the flame to others. The Old World is different: though Christian belief remains strong in some European countries, like Poland, and Islam is a potent force among Muslims across the Continent, contemporary Europe is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known. Does this place it in the vanguard of world history? That is what many Europeans think, which is why they have been caught off guard by the challenge of radical Islam even in their own backyard. They find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously and want to shape society according to his dictates.

In the year 1110, a magical fairy army under John Uskglass appeared in the north of England. At Newark, on the banks of the Trent, he forced a settlement on King Henry I, carving out a new kingdom for himself in the north with his capital at Newcastle. The Raven King's reign lasted for two centuries, and during this time he laid the foundations of English magic. After he returned to the realm of Faerie, a number of master magicians known as the Aureates, or Golden Age magicians, expanded and built on his work, but after them English magic slowly declined until only theoretical magical scholars remained.

Now, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, magic returns to Britain in the person of Mr Norrell, the first practical magician to appear in several hundred years. Intent on reviving English magic, Norrell takes London by storm, raising the profile of magic among the rich and powerful while quietly consolidating his control over it by cornering the market on genuine magical knowledge.

But before long, Norrell's composure and his status as England's only magician are shaken by the appearance of the young Jonathan Strange. Taking Strange as his pupil, Norrell discovers him to be the companion and partner that he has always deeply missed. However, the two men couldn't be more different. Norrell, surrounded by his books, remains a solitary figure, reticent, guarded, and conservative. Strange is charismatic, handsome, and brilliant, with an innovative side that frightens Norrell. Strange is instrumental in Wellington's progress against the French in Portugal, and stories of his feats, much to Norrell's dismay, make him a hero in England. What follows is a stand-off and rivalry between the two, while an unseen enemy lurks in the shadows awaiting his chance to strike a fatal blow not only against the two magicians, but at England herself.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an exciting story of fantasy, intrigue, and the intricate mysteries of Faerie, that magical realm that awaits just on the other side of every mirror, every reflection.

The plausibility of magic interacting with familiar English history is the most fascinating aspect of the book and the scenes in Portugal are among the most engaging in the story. Especially delightful is Clarke's witty portrayal of Wellington and his senior staff in her flowing, easy prose. Wellington is the Caesar of the age, constant as the northern star, and his matter-of-fact style and larger-than-life personality are one of the highlights of the novel.

Colonel Vickery had reconnoitred the wood [of olive and pine trees in Navarra] and discovered it to be full of French soldiers waiting to shoot at the British Army. His officers were just discussing what to do about it when Lord Wellington rode up. "We could go round it, I suppose," said Wellington, "but that will take time and I am in a hurry. Where is the magician?"

Someone went and fetched Strange.

"Mr Strange!" said Lord Wellington. "I can scarcely believe that it will be much trouble to you to move these trees! A great deal less, I am sure, than to make four thousand men walk seven miles out of their way. Move the wood, if you please!"

So Strange did as he was asked and moved the wood to the opposite side of the valley. The French soldiers were left cowering on a barren hillside and very quickly surrendered to the British.

Owing to a mistake in Wellington's maps of Spain the city of Pamplona was not exactly where the British had supposed it to be. Wellington was deeply disappointed when, after the Army had marched twenty miles in one day, they did not reach Pamplona which was discovered to be ten miles further north. After swift discussion of the problem it was found to be more convenient to have Mr Strange move the city, rather than change all the maps.

The ongoing battle between Strange and Norrell is engaging, and forms the core of the excitement. However, the fairy enemy, the man with the thistle-down hair as we know him, seems a weak villain. This is no Voldemort or Vader, but a vacillating schemer who spends his time in garish all-night balls at his home in Faerie, whose kidnapped guests have all been condemned to live half their lives in his dream world. The protagonists are not even aware of his existence for the greater part of the story, and the bland dialogues between him and Stephen Black, who finally turns out to be the ultimate hero, seem endless. So disconnected is this part of the story from the pace of the rest of the novel that it could have been given its own book. As a result, the story begins to slow down around page 500, and the final climax is disappointing. The promised return of the Raven King passes in a nominal scene far away from the main characters. A book with 200 fewer pages would have been that much more engaging.

England in the Napoleonic Wars is the era which Thackeray would look back at in nostalgia, during the 1840s, in books such as Vanity Fair. It is the England of stagecoaches, immediately before the railroads and industrialization in overdrive would tear apart traditional lifestyles and turn the London of Nelson into the London of Dickens. The book ends in an unsettling peace, with Strange and Norrell imprisoned perpetually in a pillar of darkness while Norrell's clever business managers start up copy-cat magical clubs which divide into factions and spread all over England. Magic disappears again, and the deep mysteries lived by Strange and Norrell become mass-produced trinkets to be argued over without any source of truth or power to give them substance. In Vanity Fair, all the old reliable things in the world are compromised or corrupted; in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell they go into hiding.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is exactly the kind of story that could work brilliantly in film, especially since the condensed format would concentrate the action. New Line Cinema has acquired the book's movie rights and the film is in production. Christopher Hampton, of Dangerous Liaisons and The Quiet American, has written the screenplay, but there is no word yet on casting. Although the few illustrations in the book are distracting, one of my strongest impressions from reading the text is that Jonathan Strange is a role that Christian Bale was born to play. For Norrell, the closest image I have is of Harry Truman: short, grey-haired and with round spectacles; Ian Holm would be an excellent choice.

Late on her wedding night, Angela Vicario is returned to her parents' house in dishonour by her husband, setting off a chain of events that results in the murder of good Santiago Nasar at the hands of her brothers a few hours later.

Told in retrospect 27 years later, Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the story of how old conventions, social prejudices and, above all, the studied complicity of an entire village lead Pablo and Pedro Vicario against their will to murder an innocent man. Within two hours, everyone in the village knows what is about to take place, except the victim himself who marches unwittingly to his death through coincidences so numerous that they are forbidden even to literature.

The moral core of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a commentary on why avoidable tragedies take place in a connected world where everything is foreseen and collective ignorance impossible, and answers one of the modern age's most resistant yet quintessential questions: "How could we have let that happen?" Márquez's answer is a cornucopia of inertia, moral lapses, misguided opinion, weak judgement, and disbelief in the unthinkable; because of the sleepiness of an only half-conscious society; because of people who almost do the right thing: who are well-meaning but indecisive, resolved yet unwise, distracted, or who simply forget.

But who is to blame when millions die of preventable causes, or hundreds of thousands are killed in genocide? Gabriel García Márquez responds that for one reason or another, almost all of us are part of the equation. The question he leaves us pondering is whether or not the reasons are good enough.

Though everyone knows what is going to happen nobody warns the victim, nor takes any decisive action to prevent the crime, in spite of ample opportunities offered by the two brothers. The book's emblematic scene depicts the crowd parting like the Red Sea as Santiago Nasar walks happily through the crammed marketplace in his last minutes with his friend Cristo Bedoya who, despite a prompt and wholehearted response, finally learns of the impending tragedy just seconds too late to avert it:

"It was a thick crowd, but Escolástica Cisneros thought she noticed that the two friends were walking in the center of it without any difficulty, inside an empty circle, because everyone knew that Santiago Nasar was about to die and they didn't dare touch him. Cristo Bedoya also remembered a strange attitude toward them. 'They were looking at us as if we had our faces painted,' he told me."

The sleepiness and unconsciousness of the town is a major theme and Márquez's smooth, hypnotic prose adds to the overall atmosphere. The story and the murder take place in the dispersed aftermath of the wedding in the early hours around dawn, as the inhabitants are just waking up from the revels of the night before. Many years later, through misty recollections, it is still unclear what the weather was like that morning, the most important morning of their lives. Was it sunny or overcast? Was it a "beautiful day" as everyone remembers Santiago Nasar remarking, or was it raining? Could the stars be seen or not?

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is an excellent choice if you are looking for an introduction to Márquez. At just over a hundred short pages, it can be read in two or three hours and is gripping from beginning to end.

Read another review and plot summary of Chronicle of a Death Foretold at LiteratuReview.com.