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MURDER MOST FOUL AND COMIC

Date: March 27, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By LEONARD MICHAELS; Leonard Michaels is the author of ''Going Places,'' stories, and ''The Men's Club,'' a novel.
Lead: CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Translated by Gregory Rabassa. 120 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $10.95.

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 events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich, handsome fellow who lived in the Caribbean town where the author grew up. Thus, as a character in his own novel, Garcia Marquez interviews people who remember the murder and studies documents assembled by the court. He accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and makes a record of what happened first, second, third, etc. In short, a chronicle.
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It emerges that virtually everyone in town knew Santiago Nasar was to be murdered, who would do it, where, when and why. Given so much foreknowledge, the mystery is how the murder could have happened. Some townspeople try to stop the murder. Others are so awed by their foreknowledge that they look upon Santiago Nasar, even as he stands before them, as dead. One person, his father's aging mistress, would like to kill him herself, but the two men who feel obliged to murder him as a matter of honor actually pity him and want to be stopped. They advertise their intention, become spectacularly drunk and flaunt terrible knives. ''They were like children,'' says a witness. Not really guilty, just hideously effective despite themselves. Only children can do everything, says the witness. In contrast to them, nobody else can do even one effective thing to prevent the murder.

Garcia Marquez, a good friend of Santiago Nasar, is identified with him, even mistaken for him by Santiago Nasar's old, dying mother, in a brief hallucination. But when the murder occurs, Garcia Marquez is out of things, recovering from wedding festivities of the previous night. He remembers being awakened from sleep, ''in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes'' by ''the clamor of alarm bells.'' Therein he is further identified with the victim, because Maria Alejandrina Cervantes was once Santiago Nasar's great passion. She is a magnificent, animalish whore whose lap is ''apostolic'' in that it carries a message of erotic faith to the town, what Garcia Marquez calls ''the disorder of love.'' The phrase names the circumstantial context of the murder and specifies its motive.

This is apparent insofar as the murder is associated with a wedding, an alleged seduction, a whore and a night of general debauch. Specifically, Santiago Nasar is murdered because he was accused of having deflowered the bride, whose husband had been confident that she was a virgin. Prior to the wedding day and even during the night-long festivities that follow, Santiago amuses himself by trying to figure out how much the celebration will cost, unaware that it will cost him his life. Meanwhile, in the middle of the night, the bride is returned to her mother's home in disgrace.Beaten by her mother, delirious with fatigue and pain, she names Santiago Nasar as her corrupter, and her two brothers set out to do the crime of honor.

Though Santiago Nasar is a gun collector, a ''killer of innocent animals'' and an arrogant, lascivious womanizer, nobody knows how he could have seduced the bride. On the other hand, Garcia Marquez offers no cogent reason to suppose he didn't. The murder, then, is motivated but never clearly justified. It remains inexorable and mysterious, and it is oddly complicated by the perverse psychology of the bride and her groom, Bayardo San Roman, a man who simply appeared in town one day.

VERY wealthy and foppish, Bayardo San Roman has supernatural talents and an indeterminate history. His bride is distinguished by her ''poverty of spirit.'' The disorder of love applies to his interest in her, which is sudden, tremendous and absolute. She doesn't love him at all, but after she is returned home in disgrace, and after Santiago Nasar is murdered, she undergoes an extraordinary conversion and discovers in herself a love for Bayardo San Roman as tremendous and inexplicable as his for her.

Among many indeterminacies - was the weather ''radiant'' or ''funereal'' on the fatal day? was Bayardo a homosexual? was he the devil? was it Santiago Nasar who deflowered the bride? - it is curious to discover a mere inconsistency. I'll approach it gradually, then treat it as a clue to the horrific comedy, which intensifies in the concluding chapters. As more and more is revealed about the murder, less and less is known, yet the style of the novel is always natural and unselfconscious, as if innocent of any paradoxical implication.

Like everyone else, Santiago Nasar had foreknowledge of his murder, but it comes in an obscure manner - dreams bearing symbolic anticipations of death. He told his dreams to his mother who ''had a well earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told her before eating.'' She doesn't notice ''any ominous augury'' and, for this reason, ''never forgave herself and succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of eating pepper cress seeds.''

The joke, mixing the uncanny and the banal, displays Garcia Marquez's ironical spirit, but more notable is the fact that Santiago Nasar's mother fails him more seriously than the joke admits. Not only doesn't she notice auguries, but, when her son is pursued by his murderers, she notices only them, not him, and she bars the door to the house. He pounds on the door. She doesn't open it. Thus, inadvertently, she guarantees that he is butchered ''like a pig.''

NOW the inconsistency. In the first chapter, Garcia Marquez says of Santiago Nasar, ''The last image his mother had of him was of his fleeting passage through the bedroom. ... So she would remember him forever.'' As if to emphasize the memory, Garcia Marquez then says, ''He waved goodbye and left the room. It was the last time she saw him.'' But in the final chapter, after barring the door and sealing his fate, his mother goes up to a balcony from which she sees ''Santiago Nasar in front of the door face down in the dust trying to rise up out of his own blood.'' Not the image ''she would remember,'' maybe, but it is the last image, the last time she sees him.

If inconsistency, in life and novels, bespeaks the unthinkable, then Garcia Marquez's inconsistency here is expressive - deliberately or not. After all, the subject of the novel is the unthinkable. All of us will be mysteriously murdered, in the sense that we don't know why we must die. Any effort to explain or rationalize our fate - especially in the linearity of a chronicle -must collapse into the absurd. Commenting on the mood of the town, Garcia Marquez says, ''For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single anxiety.'' Largely considered, his novel imitates this experience of the town.

When Santiago Nasar's poor mother becomes instrumental in his murder by barring the door, the moment is comic. Then Garcia Marquez sends her up to the balcony and makes her see what she has done, which is more than she would remember. (But then how else does chronicler Garcia Marquez find out about it?) The moment is still formally comic, but very painful, not at all funny, and it smacks of authorial sadism. In the splendid simplicity of its conception, so does the whole novel, since it is built upon a gruesome murder that is dangled before the reader, like a suspended sculpture spinning slowly in a breeze.

TOWARD the end, chapter by chapter, Santiago Nasar's murder is repeatedly presented, each time with increasing ferocity. But first it is prefigured in the kitchen of his house, while Santiago Nasar watches a servant butcher rabbits for lunch, ''surrounded by panting dogs.'' He is soon similarly butchered, and the same dogs arrive at his autopsy, panting, ravenous, eager to be fed his bowels as they were fed the rabbits'. At the autopsy, the murder spins by again in lavish detail. The pathologist actually says, ''It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead.'' Then comes the murder itself, and the wounds described in the autopsy are dynamically recreated in the course of being inflicted. Ultimately, Santiago Nasar is murdered more than anyone ever has been - more often, by more people, in more ways.

Generated by the disorder of love, the murder is associated with sexual passion, even in its prefiguration. After watching the rabbits being disemboweled, Santiago Nasar seizes a young woman by the crotch. Sexual passion is also felt in the compulsive rhythm of the novel, as it moves from one murderous description to the next; however grossly sensual or exquisitely harrowing any passage seems, Garcia Marquez - and the reader too, presumably -wants more.

The descriptions are sometimes gluttonously graphic (the dogs), sometimes quite disgusting (Santiago Nasar walks about bleeding with his bowels in his hands), and, in one telling, a strangely beautiful lyricism appears: ''Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.''

The murder of Santiago Nasar will stand among the innumerable murders of modern literature as one 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.