Leaf Storm by Gabriel García Márquez

First published:La hojarasca, 1955 (English translation, 1972)

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Macondo, an imaginary town in Colombia

Principal Characters:

• The colonel, a retired military officer
• Isabel, his daughter, thirty years old
• The child, Isabel’s son, eleven years old
• The doctor, a suicide by hanging
• Meme, an Indian servant in the colonel’s house and later the doctor’s mistress

The Novel

Leaf Storm is narrated through three alternating interior monologues: those of the colonel, his daughter Isabel, and her son. Through this structure, García Márquez chronicles the founding of the imaginary coastal town of Macondo in the late nineteenth century, its prosperity during the 1910’s, and its decadence after 1918. This is the story of the arrival and exit of the “leaf storm,” the hordes of outsiders and foreigners who descended on the Colombian coast as the region grew rich on the banana industry during a short period of wealth that ended as quickly as it had begun.

As the novel begins, the doctor has hanged himself and the colonel prepares to oversee the burial of the body. It is learned that ten years earlier, the rest of the townspeople had sworn to oppose this burial, and that the colonel is honoring a personal pledge he had made earlier to the dead man to defy the will of the others. The reason for the town’s hostility is only made clear later, as each of the three narrations goes back in time and tells the story of the doctor’s twenty-five-year stay in Macondo. At the novel’s close, the family prepares to form a funeral cortege with the coffin: What the reaction of their neighbors will be is left unknown.

The three ongoing monologues do not proceed in a linear manner. Many incidents mentioned by one character are taken up later by another, and thus the reader is engaged in a constant process of reevaluation and reconsideration of prior clues. The effect is somewhat like that of a mystery novel, in which facts are revealed by one character and corroborated later by another, but in Leaf Storm there is no suspense. The plot is circular, for as the twenty-five years between 1903 and 1928 unfold, little changes for the people who describe the events. The colonel and Isabel relate dispassionately the events of those years in a matter-of-fact tone that reveals little emotion. The child provides the perspective of an innocent observer who understands nothing of the facts, while intuitively seeing what exists beneath the controlled exterior of his elders.

Leaf Storm, then, serves as an allegory for the broader upheaval in the life of the Colombian coast brought on by foreign investment in the early part of the twentieth century. Through the memories of the colonel and Isabel, the class structure of this society, and its patterns of daily life, customs, and religious beliefs are described. The doctor’s suicide and his years in Macondo provide the framework for those memories.

The Characters

The characterization of individual voices in Leaf Storm is not its author’s primary goal. These characters represent larger forces in Colombian and Latin American society; their individual development is less important. Yet as each interior monologue progresses, certain details do emerge. Often, these details are revealed more through the musings of others than in the way a character may describe himself.

The colonel is a proud representative of an older order which has passed in Macondo, that of the founding families who built the town. He is a man to whom honor is paramount; thus he goes through with the doctor’s burial although doing so pits him against his own neighbors. Such unquestioning acceptance of a strict moral and ethical code of behavior is expressed in words recalled by Isabel, as her father tells her she must accompany him to the doctor’s house: “And then, before I had time to ask anything, he pounded the floor with his cane: We have to go through with this just the way it is, daughter. The doctor hanged himself this morning.’” Isabel is also a member of the upper class of Macondo, but, as a woman, she enjoys lower social status and has suffered many personal limitations. This fact emerges most clearly in the story of her engagement and marriage, at the age of seventeen, to a man named Martin, who later disappeared from Macondo. The marriage is completely decided and arranged by the colonel; on her wedding day, Isabel has never spent time alone with her new husband; she has scarcely even spoken to him in the company of others. The product of a certain rigidly defined class system, she sees her own destiny in fatalistic terms: “My punishment was written down before my birth,” she thinks, accepting without question her lot in life.

The child, through his ingenuous observations, provides an opportunity for García Márquez to show the world of Macondo through another, more wondrous perspective. The boy’s monologue begins the novel with the following: “I’ve seen a corpse for the first time. It’s Wednesday but I feel as if it was Sunday because I didn’t go to school.” His description of the appearance of the dead man is made in very realistic terms; he reacts directly and physically to the heat, the dark, and the generally stifling atmosphere of the doctor’s long-closed house. The child, too, sees himself as controlled by forces beyond his power; he accepts the authority of his mother and grandfather. He lives in the present, rather than the past; he is a normal child who prefers playing with his friends to attending funerals.

The doctor arrives and leaves Macondo shrouded in mystery. His name and origins are never learned; it is said several times that he was a native speaker of French, though no definite country is mentioned. One day in 1903, he presents a letter of introduction to the colonel and stays on in the house for eight years. The doctor is a strange man: For his first meal as a guest in the colonel’s home, he asks for grass to eat. During the years preceding the economic boom of Macondo, he does well as a medical practitioner, but when the banana companies move in, they bring their own physicians. His business drops off and eventually dies, and from that point onward he becomes more and more reclusive. At the time of his suicide, he has not been seen by anyone in four years.

The townspeople have vowed to refuse the doctor a final resting place because of an incident that occurred ten years earlier. He refused medical assistance to wounded men although he was the only doctor left in town, an act that the inhabitants of Macondo will never forgive. His reasons for this refusal, however, are never explained; they form one more mystery with which the reader must grapple. The portrait of the doctor is not a sympathetic one, though it would be unfair to characterize him as a villain. He is a totally self-involved individual who makes concessions to no one.

Meme, an Indian servant who is part of the colonel’s household, is part of a great underclass of poor, illiterate people. She is a protected member of the family until it is discovered that she is expecting a child which may or may not be the doctor’s. At this point, she is expelled from the colonel’s house for her transgression—as is the doctor—and they begin to live together openly. Defying morality, Meme appears one Sunday at Mass, dressed in gaudy finery, and dares to sit with the ladies of Macondo; afterward, she is surrounded by a threatening circle of men but is escorted to safety by the colonel. The doctor opens a shop for Meme with his savings, and for a while she continues to be part of the town’s life, but eventually she disappears from sight just as the doctor does. Her end, and the fate of her expected child, are two more unanswered questions. Meme inspires pity and sympathy but at the same time shows courage as the only character who tries to change her social status in Macondo.

Critical Context

Leaf Storm was García Márquez’s first novel, following the publication of various short stories. Its themes and characters mark the beginning of the saga of Macondo, a town created in its author’s imagination much as William Faulkner created the locales of his novels. Indeed, Faulkner has been recognized by García Márquez as one of his most important literary influences.

This novel is considered by critics of Latin American fiction to be a prefiguration of its author’s great work, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). Along with other shorter tales and novels, Leaf Storm introduces characters and situations that will return, in much expanded form, in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story of the doctor’s arrival and suicide, for example, is explained in the longer novel. Macondo, at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, disappears as retribution for its tremendous growth and decadence, providing a final end to the allegory.

In 1982, Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, following other Latin American writers such as Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. He is recognized as one of the leading modern novelist/story writers, and he is an active commentator of contemporary Latin American culture, especially in its relationship to society, a theme so well begun in Leaf Storm and carried out in his later works.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. A collection of eighteen essays by various authors on different aspects of Márquez’s works. Covers the whole range of literary criticism and offers in-depth analysis of several of Márquez’s novels.

Dolan, Sean. Hispanics of Achievement. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. A solid introduction to Márquez’s work, featuring photographs and quotations. Discusses Márquez’s family background, literary influences, and personal politics and how these shaped his writing.

McMurray, George R. “Gabriel García Márquez.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Márquez’s life and works, including Leaf Storm. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Márquez, Gabriel García. Interview. UNESCO Courier 49 (February, 1996): 4-7. Márquez offers his views on the teaching and protection of culture. He also discusses his daily writing discipline and how it has influenced and enhanced his work. An informative and interesting interview.

Styron, Rose. “Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Kenzaburo Oe: From the Rose Styron Conversations.” New Perspectives Quarterly 14 (Fall, 1997): 56-62. A revealing interview with three world renowned authors. They share their views on topics such as women and power, first and lost love, journalism as literature, spirit and faith, and multiculturalism.