Yaprak Fırtınası bitti. Sınavlar dolayısıyla bir haftadır elimde dolanıp duruyordu anca bitirebildim.

Daha önce iki kitabını okuduğum için Marquez sevdiğim bir yazar. Bu kitabına kadar da beğenmedim bir kitabı olmamıştı. Antigone'u andıran konusundan dolayı bu kitaba dair de büyük umutlarım vardı ama kitap umutlarımı tamamen boşa çıkardı.

Kitap aynı ailenin üç ferdinin gözünden anlatılıyor ve yazar hızlı bir şekilde bu üç karakter arasında gidip geliyor. Kitabın başında bu anlatım tarzını benimsemiştim ama kitabın ortalarından itibaren bu anlatım tarzı can sıkıcı bir hal almaya başlıyor ve kitabın kalitesinin düşmesine neden oluyor. Aynı betimlemeleri tekrar tekrar üç karakterin ağzından okumaktan dolayı kitabı okumaktan çok yoruldum. ( )

This was my first Gabriel Garcia Marquez book and it didn't take me long to see why he's a Nobel winner. I can see why readers fall in love with his books. He instantly grabs your attention. The first sentence is "I've seen a corpse for the first time." Who wouldn't want to read more after reading that awesome opening line? I'm looking forward to reading more of his work, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. ( )

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."

Set in a fictional Columbian coastal town this novella tells of the arrival and exit of the “leaf storm,” the hordes of outsiders who descended on the region as they followed the banana companies, its prosperity during the 1910’s, and its decadence after 1918. A short period of wealth that ended as quickly as it had begun.

Central to this book is the burial of the most hated man in the village and is told through the eyes of the three generations of one family: the Colonel, his daughter Isabel and his young grandson. The Colonel is motivated by a promise he made to the dead man; Isabel obeys her father's request and goes along reluctantly worried as to how the other villagers will react if they are seen attending the funeral; while the child does not fully understand what is going on and whilst he is intrigued by the sight of a dead man would rather be playing with his friends.

The dead man, an outsider of unknown origins, has been found hanged and how he arrived at the village and became to be so disliked is told through a series of flashbacks by the two older characters. Most of the book consists of inner monologues by the respective characters and there is only minimal dialogue throughout. In contrast to his elders the narrative of the young boy is primarily concerned with his fascination towards the dead and thinking of the fun things that he would rather be doing.

I read somewhere that this was the author's first piece of work and it took seven years for him to find a publisher for it. Frankly I'm not surprised. Despite realising that two of the major themes of this book is a feeling of obligation and the effects of a sudden influx of new people can have on a small community I really just couldn't really see where this was going at all and as such wasn't that impressed with it . It is at least thankfully short. ( )

A slight novella about the death of a doctor in Macondo. It's not the most engaging of his books, just a short taster. ( )

Marquez is most famous for his '100 Years...', a masterpiece of magic realism; but he wrote other stories before the novel, and 'Lead Storm' is an interesting collection that shows the ideas as they first formed. The major story in the collection, the titular piece, at first seemed too slow and disjointed, but it built a remarkable momentum as it moved forwards until, by the second half, I couldn't get enough of it. The other stories reminded me in a strange way of Borges, though I can't put my finger on why exactly. ( )