Magical Realism is a term quite hard to define. It was first coined in 1949 by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier to describe the matter-of-fact combination of the fantastic and everyday in Latin American fiction.
In other words, in this genre, you’d find magic/supernatural being an integral part of the real world. The fantastical elements are considered normal in that world. At the same time, the word Realism is added because it also includes some significant historical or present-day real world incidents, thus grounding the narrative in reality alongside its magical elements. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a good example of this. It portrays India’s transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of India, while carrying the magic bit too.
So, when we talk about Magical Realism, it’s imperative that we mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez who was principally responsible for a worldwide popularity of the genre in late-twentieth-century fiction. That’s because his world is fascinating. In his world, a dead man’s blood may run across multiple streets and up and down staircases, into a house – “hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs” – through a pantry and into the kitchen where the dead man’s mother is cooking. And it will feel quite natural. That’s the power of good literature, isn’t it?
How should one explore Gabriel Garcia’s works? Let’s try to address this question.
- If you enjoy short stories, particularly the ones with magic that attract a child’s curiosity, then you should start with a short story titled A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. It involves the eponymous character who appears in a family’s backyard on a stormy night. What follows are the reactions of the family, a town, and outside visitors.
- If you don’t mind jumping straight into the novels, then you have three wonderful options – each one of which is a treat in itself.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the (fictitious) town of Macondo. Many – including Salman Rushdie – have called it the greatest novel in the last fifty years.
- Love in the Time of Cholera is a story of two people who fall in love and then find each other again after fifty years, nine months and four days.
- The Autumn of the Patriarch is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator. The novel is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypical Caribbean tyrant.
Kalampedia 