Books: Back to Macondo

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LEAFSTORM AND OTHER STORIES by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 146 pages. Harper & Row. $6.50.

Colombian Writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's only novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a seismic literary event in Latin America when first published in 1967. Translated three years later, it received awestruck notices in the U.S., and has continued to attract not so much readers as proselytizers. The chronicle of an enchanted town called Macondo, it is a "good read" in the Dickensian sense: it has abundant life, a tangle of characters and plots, all supported by a clear moral viewpoint.

The new book, which contains a novella and six stories, is in most ways a letdown. Leafstorm, the long work, is also about Macondo, but it is an early, earnest exercise in which three narrators—a boy, his mother and his grandfather—recall the old man's efforts to give a decent burial to an outcast whom the town wants to leave to the vultures.

It is rilled with undifferentiated nostalgia—for old values, old vitality, old civility. One searches in vain for the raffish Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude—modeled on the banana boom town of Aracataca, where the author was born. Macondophiles will at least learn some new bits and pieces about the place. The action starts with a note from Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the great revolutionary warrior who returns in Solitude, and the recluse Rebeca also makes an ectoplasmic appearance.

But Garcia Marquez, who is now 43, obviously came to terms with his great gifts after he had finished Leafstorm. He has acknowledged that reading Faulkner and making a pilgrimage through Yoknapatawpha country helped him to enrich his own private literary property and see its mythic possibilities. At any rate he developed from a cautious, limited craftsman into a prodigal fabulist with total command in his protean imagination.

It is in the more recent short stories included here that one finds the authentic Garcia Marquez in the humor, the color and detail, the easy access to magic balanced by harder ironies. In The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, ostensibly written for children, the inhabitants of a fishing vil lage discover a magnificent corpse on the beach, and in marveling at its splendor come to recognize the meanness of their own lives. In another story, a flea-bitten old angel makes a mysterious appearance.

Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles is a wicked little fable about an itinerant worker of cures and exactly how he acquired his specialty. Blacaman is the kind of brazen fellow Garcia Marquez obviously enjoys. The only thing he refuses to do is raise the dead, because, he says, "They're murderous with rage at the one who disturbed their state." He knows better, however. Offered the road to sainthood, he declines: "The truth is that I'd gain nothing by being a saint after being dead; an artist is what I am." And he actually manages to live forever. ·Martha Duffy