I read a lot of magic realism novels. But not the most iconic ones in its trajectory. After graduating from NEHU back in 2013, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude served as an introduction to the genre. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.
The family’s eccentricities shaped the fate of the town. Replete with nature imagery, there is a vibrancy in Marquez’s long descriptions in which lay underlying meanings.
Marquez saw dreams as an escape from the dullness of reportage writing as a journalist. He once told The Paris Review that his stories captured every bit of his dreams. To some who are not familiar with fantasy novels, they would judge Marquez’s descriptions as overwrought and not making sense. But the fact is that therein lies its beauty for the style deals with the unrealistic.
Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart was another book I read. His conversational and Americanism style is oddly deceptive as he employs brevity to cohere with rush of thoughts in the reader. Many things are illuminated of Sumire’s character as she cleansed herself in this coming-of-age tale.
Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book was raved by critics in the media. Pamuk has been one who revealed the beauty of Turkish society to the western world. He delves deep into minute details and describes with gentle intensity the uniqueness of life there. But I found most of the descriptions to be lacking in coherence.
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey had magic realism as a minimal effect to intensify emotions in sentences, especially used at the end of a paragraph. The weird neighbours of Gustad are being described with beauty with all their eccentricities.
Julio Cortazar’s 62: A Model Kit was dark and surrealistic as the central character sitting in a café enters the minds of others there. The stream of consciousness style was employed well as the book was rich with symbology and varied interpretations.
Roberto Bolano’s Woes of the True Policeman and The Insufferable Gaucho had dark revelatory sentences akin to hallucinations experienced by a mental patient. While reading I was thinking to myself whether Bolano was a partially-recovered schizophrenic. Some literary critics said he was into drugs.
Bolano, in his writings, is revealed as one who has a fragmented mind because there is a disjointedness in emotions which leads him to focus on descriptions in parts. He often writes stories within stories and leaves the reader in awe of his genius.
While the term magical realism first appeared in 1955, the term magischer realismus, translated as magic realism, was first used by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit. Roh identified magic realism’s accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and portrayal of the ‘magical’ nature of the rational world. It reflected the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment.
Magic realism was later used to describe the uncanny realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and Henry Koerner, along other artists during the 1940s and 1950s.
German magic realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality.
Roh’s magic realism also influenced writers in Hispanic America, where it was translated as realismo mágico in 1927.
French-Russian-Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who rejected Roh’s magic realism as tiresome pretension, developed his related concept real maravilloso, or marvelous realism, in 1949.
The term magical realism, as opposed to magic realism, first emerged in the 1955 essay Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction by critic Angel Flores to refer to writing that combines aspects of magic realism and marvelous realism.
After Flores’s essay, there was a resurgence of interest in marvelous realismwhich, after the Cuban revolution of 1959, led to the term magical realism being applied to a new type of literature known for matter-of-fact portrayal of magical events.
For my next read, I’m planning to lend Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of A Death Foretold from the State Central Library. I hope it will help me in comprehending more of the genre. The story is about setting out to reconstruct a murder. The plot moves backwards and forwards in time, where the role of memory is challenged. So yes, yearning for that novel.
Reading suggestions for the week:
1. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
2. Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Illustration of author Roberto Bolano: Pinterest
