"Leaf Storm" (by Gabriel García Márquez)

It has been such a long time since I read Márquez! I am still remembering what impression ´One hundred years of solitude´ made on me when I read it as a teenager (in Polish). Everyone was reading it those days in Poland (I am talking late 80s here). Anyway, since then I have not come back to reading Márquez till now.

 

This novella (short novel) introduces the village of Macondo (which is exactly the same place as in ´One hundred years of solitude´). It is just that ´Leaf Storm´ was published in 1955 and ´One hundred years...´ in 1967. One can read ´Leaf Storm´ at one sitting really as it is not exactly long. But it is not a light read. Written from the three individuals perspectives - the grandfather (the Colonel), his daughter and his grandson. Three of them go to the corner house to the wake of the hated-by-the-whole-village doctor. They come to fulfil the Colonel´s promise given to the doctor years back - the promise to bury the body of the doctor when the time comes. It is a gruesome scene - filthy neglected house in which lonely, withdrawn and rejected (with quite peculiar and not exactly pleasant personality) doctor hang himself. His body gets put in the coffin, one shoe left behind.... They are waiting for the official permission to bury the body. Time is dragging, and in the meantime the reader is being told the story of the doctor (and bits of the town´s story) in retrospection and in no particular order by entering the thoughts of those three characters (granddad, daughter and her son). It kept me guessing and interested. Yet, not everything is revealed - not even the name of the doctor, or where he really came from nor what happened to his Indian mistress (who mysteriously disappeared years earlier). Gloomy but brilliant!  

 

I am planning on reading ´One hundred year of solitude´ again but in original - the copy of the book on my book shelf - a gift from my partner - awaiting me patiently. I know it is not going to be easy to read it in Spanish (even though I have  read it before and in my native language - but it was over 20 years ago so it does not count) but I have been wanting to do it for quite a while now.