I don't know if it was a bad week for concentration, but I have to admit I had a difficult time with "Leaf Storm," the first and longest (130 pages) of the "short" stories in this collection by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Told through the voices of three characters of a small town, the story revolves around a stranger who appears the same time as the notorious "leaf storm," becomes the town doctor, has a mental breakdown, and dies a friendless recluse, both loathed and feared by the townsfolk.
The story is dreamlike and lush, yet the translator, Gregory Rabassa, did a poor job of marking changes between narrators. The story is told all in first person, but the person speaking changes frequently, sometimes even from paragraph to paragraph. So, with no stylistic break or transition, this made for a very difficult read.
Once past "Leaf Storm," however, I found myself enraptured by the tales in the six other short stories in the collection. Two of the stories are actually subtitled "A Tale For Children," and are the ones I found most compelling.
In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," (originally published in Playboy) we see a town transformed when the body of a stranger washes up on the shore. And "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" tells of an angel kept captive as an oddity by a curious family who rescues him after a flood. These two stories remind me a lot of the "children's" stories of Hans Christian Andersson ("The Little Match Girl") and Oscar Wilde ("The Selfish Giant").
I would recommend finding Leaf Storm and Other Stories translated by someone other than Gregory Rabassa, if you can, to see if you'll get a clearer version of the title story. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has created some fabulous mythological characters that will stay with you long after you finish this collection. Now pardon me while I go re-read "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World."
Also by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Living to Tell the Tale; One Hundred Years of Solitude, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, In Evil Hour, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth, Strange Pilgrims, Collected Stories, and Of Love and Other Demons.
