Chronicle of a Death Foretold is an account of the killing of Santiago Nasar. Told 27 years after the crime by an unnamed narrator (arguably García Márquez himself) who returns to the village where he once lived to put back together "the broken mirror of memory," the story is constructed from the fragmented and often conflicting versions of events as they are remembered by the townspeople and by the narrator himself. Santiago lived with …showed first 75 words of 1053 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1053 total…fantastic. That is, while everything a magic realist writes has a historical basis, it also has fictitious elements throughout. Emphasizing this point, García Márquez said in an interview with Peter H. Stone in The Paris Review, "It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality."