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.
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