reporting technique, but the novel does not rest on the drama itself or the characters, but it stands on its own structure. The characters don't have their real names, nor is there any description of the place where it all took place. Everything is poetically transposed. The only things that have their own names are the members of my family, who have authorised it. Naturally, the characters are going to be recognisable, and this should, according to me, interest the critics—its the comparison between the reality and the literary work....The novel appeared last Monday, (and immediately a guessing game started to identify who is who) and a magazine in Bogota has already published a report on the place and the aforementioned protagonists. They have produced a work, which, to me, seems excellent: but what is incredible is that the drama the witnesses have recounted is totally different than that in the book. Totally' is perhaps not an adequate term. The start is the same, but the evolution is different. I like to think that the drama in my book is better: it is well-mastered, well-structured. Garcia Marquez explained his craft to Apuleya Mendoza in somewhat similar vein. The first sentence, according to Garcia Marquez, is 'the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book.' And the first sentence of Chronicle, is sparse, straightforward, and apparently quite simple : 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.' But, as he says, it sets the tone—an almost straightforward reconstruction of a murder that took place years earlier. Almost', because we are entering into a maze with the narrator who tries diligently to solve the riddle of the people concerned. The years have gone by, not just one or two, but more than twenty: and with the years, not only has the memory of the incident got confused, but even the idea behind the writing has gone through a remarkable change. Garcia Marquez recalls the whole process of writing and how his initial idea got changed : When the event took place in 1951,1 was interested in it not as material for a novel but as a newspaper article. But the genre wasn't very well developed in Colombia at the time, and I was a provincial journalist on a local paper which wouldn't have been interested in the matter anyway. I started thinking about the case in literary terms several years later, but I always had to bear in mind how upset my mother would be at the very thought of seeing so many of her friends and relatives in a book written by her son. Still, the truth of it is that I wasn't really gripped by the subject until after I'd chewed it over for many years. I discovered the vital ingredient—that the two murderers didn't want to commit the crime and tried their utmost to get somebody to prevent it, without success. This is the only really unique element in the drama, the rest is pretty commonplace in Latin America. A latter Journal of Arts and Ideas 79