Leaf Storm

Leaf Storm (Spanish original La hojarasca) is the first novel published in 1955 by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and the first work he considered serious. The 'leaf storm' of the title refers to the outsiders who poured into Macondo with the banana company—they swept into the closed town like a gale and scattered its old order of life. The novel's action lasts only half an hour: an eccentric doctor despised by most of the town hangs himself, and the old colonel, who once had an agreement with him, ignores the town's cold stares and brings his daughter Isabel and his grandson to the doctor's house to lay out the body and attend the funeral. During this brief half hour, three generations each sift through fragments of memory from more than twenty years, and through constantly shifting narrative perspectives they piece together a small-town story of promise, shame, and solitude, reflecting also the changes in Macondo after the banana company's economy swept through. Macondo appears for the first time in this book, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía also makes his first appearance here; it is therefore regarded as the prototype and prelude to One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it establishes almost all the themes of García Márquez's later work—solitude. The three alternating monologues already show his later manner of fusing reality with nightmare and private memory with local history. The book is not long, about ninety thousand characters, yet it is already the earliest practice ground for magical realism.