Leaf Storm

Leaf Storm is Gabriel García Márquez's first novel and the work that made his name, first published in 1955. The story takes place in Macondo, the small town later made famous by One Hundred Years of Solitude: a foreign doctor who never fit in dies in his clinic, and most of the town wants nothing to do with him; only the old colonel, once helped by the doctor, insists on going with his daughter Isabel and his grandson to lay out the body. The novel compresses its narrative into the half hour or so around the funeral, letting the three generations speak in turn from their own perspectives; along the short walk to the room where the body lies, memories of the town's past thirty years keep surfacing: the flood of people brought by the banana company like so much "leaf storm," the prosperity and decline that followed, the barriers and suspicions between outsiders and locals, and the loneliness and regret no one can put into words. The collage of multiple perspectives, the free handling of time, and the thick atmosphere already reveal the embryo of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is why the book is often called its prelude. Short in length but intricate in structure, it is a key to understanding where García Márquez's writing began and to entering the world of Macondo.