Leaf Storm Book Review

Leaf Storm is a novella written by the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It has the lyrical and immersive writing that Marquez is well known for, but it is also often difficult to comprehend.

Like many of his other stories, this takes place in the fictional village of Macando. The story follows a colonel, his daughter Isabel, and his young grandson at the burial of a doctor despised by the entire village.

Marquez uses his signature poetic language to cover themes like solitude, societal conventions, culture, love and death. We switch between the point of view of the three main characters throughout the story, sometimes even mid-chapter. He bends time to his own will, often jumping between different timelines.

The multiple timelines and the changing POVs are combined with descriptions that evoke the senses and paint cinematic pictures in the reader's mind. Marquez is able to take a basic plot like this and elevate it to a rich and multi-layered story. Each successive POV change lets you piece together the inner truth of the situation. It keeps building on top of the fascinating story of Macando, and it’s equally fascinating people.

But, because of the very same literary choices, this can be often result in lots of confusion. It definitely skews towards being overly poetic at the cost of being too repetitive and sometimes incomprehensible. You often find yourself wondering where you are in the story, who is talking, and what the hell is happening.

Having said that, Marquez consistently manages to pull you back and engage you again and again into this wonderful world. Through this novella has its flaws, I enjoyed it quite a lot and as always when reading any work of Marquez, it made me marvel at how imaginative and creative he can be.

Good things about Leaf Storm

• Characters
• Scene Descriptions
• World Building

Bad things about Leaf Storm

• Pacing
• Editing

Rating: 3.5 / 5