Gabriel García Márquez, Leaf Storm, 1954

There’s hardly a trace of any magical realism to Leaf Storm, which is set in Macondo, the imaginary town Márquez was to return to later for One Hundred Years of Solitude. But he does use multiple viewpoints from three generations of a family, whose grandfather is the only person who wishes to provide a dignified funeral for a doctor that the rest of the town would prefer to see rot in hell. Márquez prefers to slowly reveal the mysterious doctor from behind a veil of obscurity in a way that doesn’t allow other characters to resolve their own individual kinds of spiritual limbo in relation to him; another issue for me was that all three very different narrators seem to relate their versions of events in the same written style, a tactic which I found problematic though was probably entirely deliberate. Hence a puzzling story, and one which perhaps conceals its intent a little too well.   PY

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