I am reviewing the Collected Novellas, not the Collected Stories. Goodreads appears to have combined them into one thread, not knowing there's a difference.
I give "Leaf Storm" only four stars because the shifting narrators and their mild stream of consciousness makes the story a bit more difficult than it's worth. I've read reviews that are quite negative toward "Leaf Storm", but I found the prose excellent and the story quite interesting as we gradually learned the truth of what happened between the doctor and the maid, and for what exact reason the town holds him in contempt. Time has passed slowly, yet events from decades past are as fresh as the town's festering wound left by the departing banana company. I've been a part of funerals such as the doctor's, where I knew that regardless of what I did, how I looked or what my subjective truth was, the townspeople had their minds made up and any observation was used only to confirm their long-held beliefs.
"No One Writes to the Colonel" (five stars!) -- what a powerful story, alternately despairing and hopeful, at turns darkly comedic and tragic. Time is passing too slowly as the colonel and his wife wait to put their deceased son's rooster in a cockfight. Will they run out of food first? They have been abandoned by the government which the colonel fought for and he is holding himself to a code of honor which may kill them.
"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is one of the best novellas I've ever read, a breathless 95 pages that held me in suspense even though it did exactly what it said it would do. Again, various characters are held back by fatigue, sloth or faulty thinking, while a few others are propelled forward by a code of honor they'd rather not uphold. Restrictive gender roles come into play, along with racial prejudice and an apathetic church.
I seem to read a Garcia Marquez book every ten years or so, maybe it's time to pick up my pace. A good friend gave me this book in 2002 and it took me this long to get around to it because my books were packed in boxes as I moved around. I think that she recognized certain characteristics in Garcia Marquez that were similar to how I told stories about my family, particularly deaths, funerals, resentment, and how the past is destructively alive when people hold certain mindsets.

10. Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez
translators Gregory Rabassa & J. S. Bernstein
published: 1990
format: 281 page paperback
acquired: December
read: Feb 5 - 11
rating: 4½

It's a pity I waited so long to review these, but these novellas are the work of a, using the word of my flight attendant, master. Not sure I can capture much now.

n  Leaf Stormn (1955)
This is a story of transition. In Márquez's fictional Macondo the Banana growers move in giving the town a burst of activity and industry, then this all fades and the town slowly reverts back to its former insignificance. The story here is about a doctor who comes to town and stays with a family, and doesn't leave until he's nudged out, encouraged to move two houses down. Over the course of time this doctor runs a strong and then weakening practice, stops practicing, becomes reclusive and finally manages to accrue the hatred of most of the town. But the story, which switches narrators without warning, is largely about the family that originally boards him.

This story stands out for its various layers of complexity that I could pick up on a read through it. It's a very ambitious work and mostly works brilliantly n  

I was sitting across from the Indian woman, who spoke with an accent mixed with precision and vagueness, as if there was a lot of incredible legend in what she was recalling but also as if she was recalling it in good faith and even with the conviction that the passage of time had changed legend into reality that was remote but hard to forget.

n

n  No One Writes to the Coloneln (1961)
A fully depressing story because it's hard not to like the colonel and his wife, as they starve waiting for a military pension to arrive that never will arrive.

n  Chronicle of a Death Foretoldn (1981)
Quite fun stuff about a murder that isn't a mystery. The narrator is part of the tale, but tells the tale as if he were a journalist writing an investigative essay, interviewing every key character and then trying to read between the lines. What comes out is psychologically meaningful and even touching, but does a lot of different stuff along the way.

Note: I only read Chronicle of a Death Foretold and not the other two stories in this edition.

This was a pleasant surprise for a required reading.

I was expecting a novel that was about trying to figure out who the murderer was, but that's not what the story about. Who is killed and who killed that person was revealed in the first chapter. What the story is actually about is why that person is killed and the connections to the murder with various people in the town and the town's reaction to that murder, both right after it happened and years after.

Out of the two short stories I had to read for my class this quarter ( Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead being the other), this was definitely my favorite.

I just started The Leaf Storm. Even though I'm still never totally comfortable reading things written primarily in the present tense, there's something infectious about Marquez's prose...

his prose is as magical as the elements in the book. I'm normally a fast reader, but this book made me pause. Each novella is different, but thematically they are all connected.

Marquez paints some dark images in these three early novellas all with a theme of death. dense with characters and threads that will overlap and entwine in later works, you have to pay attention. and attention to detail is Marquez's trademark story telling.

Leaf Storm: 3.5

Esta colección de novellas es una excelente combinación de historias. Fue uno de los primero libros(en español) que lei por mi cuenta fuera de la escuela y puedo decir que fue una de las mejores decisiones que he tomado. Como muchas obras de esta autor, las historias y su descripción de Puerto Rico te hacen pegar a la pagina y no querer parar de leer. Como puertorriqueño me enorgullece leer sus historias y saber que tal prócer vino de nuestra pequeña islita.

Wonderful! Chronicle of the Death Foretold is probably the best of the three novellas in this collection but the other two are very, very good too. The stories are gripping and taunting and the writing is so BEAUTIFUL.

Skip over Leaf Storm (the first novella in the collection), and go directly to “The Colonel...” where you will find the most sympathetic characters Garcia Marquez’s has created. Although the third novella, “Chronicle...” has its inconsistencies, it is like a little generator that keeps pumping out suspense.

I've finished reading the Chronicles of a Death Foretold, and will be in a daze for the next few hours

Marquez was (and it is heartbreaking to use the past tense here) a terribly talented man.

1) Leaf Storm: "Ordinary grass ma'am. The kind that donkeys eat"
The first appearance of Macondo (Those that haven't read One Hundred Years, really need to do so). Marquez hasn't yet developed his trademark magical realism, but the process, so to speak, has begun. Leaf Storm is a tale of duty, bitterness, and nihilism in a characteristically Marquez-like bleak setting. The descriptions and analogies are nigh on perfect, particularly that hint of magical realism with which he describes the movement of a clock's hand, and the relativity of time itself.

2) No One Writes to the Colonel: The highlight of the collection. This story is powerful. Marquez doesn't attempt to evoke pity for the colonel. His descriptions are accurate, detailed and devoid of emotional significance, which only serves to enhance his pathos. And all of it builds up to a supremely powerful crescendo in the final "Shit.", which will resonate with the reader for days.

3) Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Never has there ever been a death more foretold. Or more disappointing. It's a nice enough story, Marquez has weaved his peculiar style of narration with suspense (of a sort anyway) in an interesting manner, but in my view, this was the low point of the collection