Can Gabrial Garcia Marquez work within the confines of the novella?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is good and in a weird way would probably be better if it weren't by one of the world's great novelists but inevitably we hold GGM to a higher standard and therefore this somewhat slight novella seems small set against 100 Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera. It's the story of one episode, murder to avenge a sister's ruined reputation, seen from the perspective of about 20 years after the fact, the facts of the story uncovered by the narrator who visits his hometown to interview those still around and reconstruct the story - much like a journalist (though it's never stated that he was doing research for any kind of writing project), much like GGM (former journalist) himself, in fact maybe GGM had embarked on exactly this "assignment" when younger. It has many of the strengths of GGM's best work, such as the atmospherics, the sometimes ludicrous attention to detail (the precise accounting for an description of the knife wounds, e.g.), the sense of the interconnected lives of those in a remote village or small city- but it doesn't have the capacity to stand alone as a novella, there's not enough of a presence of a payoff - as noted in yesterday's post, it seems like stray chapter from another work. I did expect more of a twist at the end, in fact thought I could see it coming (spoiler!): would it have been possible that the two brothers did not kill Santiago? That someone else got there first? But no, the story is as it appears to be, and the characters afterwords went on to live through the sorrows of their lives - beautifully written and evoked, but it shows that GGM needs the larger canvas of a novel in order to work at his best.