Leaf Storm (Gabriel García Marquez)

Leaf Storm is probably the least popular of all García Marquez’s novels. A man hangs himself and nobody in the village wants him to be buried as punishment for something he didn’t do in the past. The story is narrated by three characters and is constructed with the memories and fears of each one of them. They are a Colonel, his only daughter and his only grandson. Three points of view of the same event, of the same people and of the same place. Despite the bad criticism, it is worth reading the origins of Macondo and watch it grow into the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

                                                         

Living to tell the tale (Vivir para contarla)

Living to tell the tale is perhaps Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece.


In this book he tells his own life story in much the same magical way he tells all his other stories. In To live to tell it Gabo describes his family and his life until his early years as a writer; his childhood in his grandfather’s house and the ghosts that inhabited it, his schooldays, his ever growing family, his first writing job. Many of the characters and instances can be recognised in later stories, making it sometimes difficult to differentiate reality from fantasy.


Simply Brilliant!

                                                       

Of Love and Other Demons (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

On 26 October 1949 Gabriel Garcia Marquez is sent, by his newspaper to Santa Clara Convent, where several tombs were being emptied to try to get a story. Out of one of the tombs came this massive copper coloured hair measuring twenty two meters and belonging to a young girl. The tombstone simply read a name Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, no surname, no clue as to whom she may have been. This reminded the writer of a story he heard as a child, told by his grandmother, of a young Marquise aged twelve who had been bitten by a dog and performed miracles. And that is the story of this book.

Sierva María was the daughter of a decadent Marquis and his non-noble second wife. The girl is raised by the slaves much like one, with hardly any supervision from either of her parents. One day she is bitten by a dog and fear that she may have caught rabies arise, changing the attitude of her father towards her.

Seeing as no doctor can possibly help her, her father asks the Church for help. In their opinion she doesn’t have rabies, but is possessed… and from there starts an impossible love story.