Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: book review

Leaf Storm (1955 as La Hojarasca – The Newcomer, published in English in 1972, this edition 2014) is set in the fictional town Macondo. It is 2:30 pm on Wednesday, 12 September 1928. It is the funeral of the foreign doctor – ‘the most hated man in town.’

Only Colonel Aureliano Buendia, his 30-year-old daughter Isabel, and ‘the child’ who is almost 11 years old, attend the funeral; the rest of the town would rather let the old doctor rot. Isabel wonders how they will treat her now.

The doctor, who hanged himself, was about 60-years-old, arriving in Macondo 25 years earlier, in 1903, and living for the first eight years with the Colonel until he was ‘thrown out.’ The Colonel’s Indian housemaid, Meme, left the house too so that she could live with the doctor. Six years later she left Macondo– that was 11 years ago.

Through the three narrators (three generations of the Buendia family) we learn of Isabel’s husband who abandonned her nine years ago, never to return, when ‘the child’, the boy, was two-years-old. We learn of the Colonel’s wife, Adelaida, and ‘Pup’ the priest. And we learn why the townfolk despise the foreign doctor so much.

Leaf Storm is about abandonment, loss, betrayal, rejection, solitude, reclusion and isolation, and the rituals of death. The writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) is succinct, evocative, and sensory – but continually wafting from the pages is the scent of death.

This novella is the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, published in English in 1970) set in the same fictional town, with some of the same characters. Although I am reading this novella many years after reading the novel, it nevertheless excels as a stand-alone short story by the Colombian winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. And it makes me want to read One Hundred Years again.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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