Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez's novella La Hojarasca. First published in 1955, it took seven years to find a publisher. Widely celebrated as the first appearance of Macondo, the fictitious village later made famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Leaf Storm is a testing ground for many of the themes and characters later immortalized in said book. It is also the title of a short story collection by García Márquez.
The other stories compiled in the English translation are “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, “Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles”, “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship”, “The Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo”, and “Nabo”. Several of these short stories appeared elsewhere before being put into this compilation. “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1971. “A Very Old Man with Wings” first appeared in New American Review and “Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles” was first published in Esquire Magazine.
The narrative of Leaf Storm shifts between the perspectives of three generations of one family as the three characters (father, daughter and grandson respectively) find themselves in a spiritual limbo after the death of a man passionately hated by the entire village yet inextricably linked to the patriarch of the family.
Read more about Leaf Storm: Plot Introduction, Plot Summary
Famous quotes containing the words leaf and/or storm:
““... Can poet’s thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish’s scale,
Be mimicry?””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)