LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES [First UK edition]

Gabriel García Márquez [Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa]

ISBN 10: 0224007750 / ISBN 13: 9780224007757

Published by Jonathan Cape, 37 Essex Street, Strand, London, 1972

About this Item

First impression of the first UK edition. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. ***Very good in forest-green cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine. Top edge of text-block stained green by the publisher. Boards clean and unmarked. Edges of boards slightly rubbed. Corners of boards slightly bumped. Internally near fine. There is a very small period 'Foyles' book-shaped booksellers label to bottom corner of front pastedown.No foxing. Pages clean. Spine tight. ***In a very good colour illustrated dustwrapper, that has not been price-clipped, retaining the original publisher's price of £1.95 net. Edges of dustwrapper slightly creased and rubbed. 2.5cm closed tear to top inner edge of rear dustwrapper flap. Tiny loss and rubbing to corners of dustwrapper. Dustwrapper bright. ***146 pages. 204 mm x 138 mm. ***Stories: Leaf Storm; 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; Monologue of isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo; Nabo. ***'Leaf Storm' is the first novella Gabriel García Márquez ever wrote. He began it when he was nineteen and it was published eight years later. It is set in Macondo, the town already familiar to readers of the fabulous One Hundred Years of Solitude, and covers the flux of its fortunes between 1903 and 1928. Three narrators - father, daughter and grandson - recall the town's long feud with an eccentric, grass-eating French doctor who once refused to tend some wounded men. When the doctor hangs himself, the townspeople will not let him be buried. It is left to the old colonel, whose life was once saved by the strange physician, to dissuade them from their bitter revenge. ***The six shorter stories in this volume, written in more recent years, are all marvelously original. One story is about a drowned man whose magnificent appearance awakens the inhabitants of a fishing village to the meanness of their own lives; others tell of the strange last voyage of a ghost ship and of the poor couple who find a fallen angel on the beach. ***Displaying both the earlier and later styles of Gabriel García Márquez, the maturing of his imagination, Leaf Storm is further testimony to the genius of a brilliant myth-maker, a master fabulist.' (Quotes taken from the front flap of the dustwrapper). ***First impression of the first UK edition very hard to find in its original dustwrapper in collectable condition. An uncommon book now in first edition. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Seller Inventory # 6072z

Bibliographic Details

• Title: LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES [First UK edition]
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 37 Essex Street, Strand, London
• Publication Date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0224007750
• ISBN 13: 9780224007757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First UK Edition
• Printing: First Impression
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • First Editions
  • Literature in Translation

About this title

Synopsis

As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognisable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay. Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.

From the Back Cover

'Garcia Marquez has extraordinary strength and firmness of imagination and writes with the calmness of a man who knows exactly what wonders he can perform. Strange things happen in the land of Marquez. As with Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, every sentence breaks the silence of a vast emptiness, the famous New World 'solitude' that is the unconscious despair of his characters but the sign of Marquez's genius.'