By Gabriel Garcia MarquezHarperPernnial
Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His numerous works of fiction include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Leaf Storm, the first novella in this collection, introduces the reader to Marquez’s fictional village of Macondo — translated the name means "banana" and just happens to be the name of the large banana plantation in his childhood village. This is Marquez’s early writing in a period before he found his ‘magical realism’ style. While Macondo appears in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Macondo in Leaf Storm is a much different village. It is a devastating place of decay and poverty. This setting is just as much a character as Meme or the doctor.
The novella opens with the darkest of scenes, setting the tone for the story. The reader looks through the eyes of a young boy as his mother and grandfather lead him into a house that he believed to be abandoned. Inside is the corpse of the doctor on a bed in a room full of rubbish, where the windows are sealed shut.
The point of view then switches to the mother. She shows the reader that the doctor is a much hated man. The whole village wants him to rot upon his bed and his stench to fill the streets. The mother knows her father’s actions to remove the body and give the doctor a proper burial will associate her and her son with the dead man’s curse.
Marquez then moves back in time to tell the story of the mysterious doctor, the grandfather, the mother, and Meme, a woman who lived with the doctor and then disappeared. This is a story about a promise and how it must be kept.
No One Writes To The Colonel is the tale of a stately and refine man, even if a little naïve, who sits for fifteen years waiting as each Friday his pension check, from a long ago overthrown government, does not arrive. The colonel and his wife are now living off of nothing but credit.
The solution comes down to the prize rooster, who will fight in the next match that January. But to keep this potential prize money a reality, the colonel and his wife must take precious food from their own mouths and feed it to the rooster. Marquez’s multi-layered character adds a richness to this story that pulls the emotions from the reader.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold will be left for the reader to explore. I will give them a hint that it involves a fatal act of violence. Interesting fact about this novella: Fidel Castro had a hand in the proofreading process.
For me it’s always a treat to read the early works of a great writer. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is no exception. Somewhere I read that Marquez said he removed Faulkner from his system by reading Hemmingway. This work seems to fall into that period when he was searching for his voice. I would strongly recommend these novellas to fans and new readers alike.
Review by Ann Hite
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