Repetitious, Foreshadowing, Subtly Ornate
By the end of the novel, you probably got tired of certain phrases, like this one:
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. (1.1)
How many times does he say it? We don't know; enough that we've lost count.
It makes sense that a novel with the title Chronicle of a Death Foretold would be full of foreshadowing. After all, that's what foretold means. But Santiago's death isn't the only thing that's foretold. We know about his mom's loneliness before it happens, and we learn about Bayardo's weirdness before we see it firsthand. All of this gives the novel a feeling of being predestined. Like all of the people in the town, we can fall into the thought that certain things are inevitable.
Of course Santiago is going to die—it was foreshadowed from the first line. Of course Angela is going to be returned to her mother, it happened several times before. But you should keep in mind that might not be the case. The townspeople are convinced that Santiago must die, even though his murder is totally preventable. Don't let yourself fall into that same trap!
Oh, and about the subtly ornate language and imagery? This is Marquez toning it down for us:
She had watched him from the same hammock and in the same position in which I found her prostrated by the last lights of old age when I returned to this forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards. (1.6)
Isn't that an extraordinarily poetic line to find in a novel that's supposed to be journalistic? Just like the repetition and the foreshadowing, this ornate writing style adds to the feeling of being in a dream world where everything is confusing and no facts are certain.