The South American village Macondo, hot and dusty, wouldn't have been known if it wasn't for the banana companies that came and went some time ago.  Now the village is slowly falling asleep again.
A teenage boy, his mother and his grandfather are the only people of the village that came to keep watch over the corpse of the doctor.  Their thoughts, internal monologues, follow and overlap each other, and in this strange mix of observations of now and memories from long ago the story of the deceased slowly unravels.

The doctor, a Frenchman, arrived in the village at the same time as the priest did, many years ago.  He lived in the house of the boy's grandfather, until he and the grandfather's maid went and lived together in the house that would later become the maid's shop.  The Frenchman came into a state of apathy, even so that he didn't want to help the villagers when they came with wounded people since he "had forgotten everything".  And when the maid he lived with disappeared the village collectively decided to ignore him as they silently accused and convicted him for her alleged death, and they continue to ignore him now after his death.  They even resent that the grandfather, a retired colonel, takes responsibility for the deceased's wake and funeral, but the colonel stubbornly continues the preparations of that funeral.

The overlapping monologues tell about each individual's memories of what happened, or about the observations in this quite warm room where they all gathered now.  But the result is the story of the village, a part of its history at least.  And though except for the mayor we don't really learn much about other people, Marquez does paint the village for us through the story of the doctor.  And this is not unimportant, as this first novel - or novella, rather - starts something that lead to the highly praised One Hundred Years of Solitude which plays in the same village, a book that earned Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.  That alone makes it worth a read.