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What do you think about magical realism?


KEV67

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I think Magical Realism refers to books like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I read The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, which I think is also an example. I disliked them both. I cannot think of too many other books like this that I have read. Either a book is realistic, or at least not supernatural; or the book is clearly fantasy, science fiction or whatever. I read a book by Bernard Cornwell about one of King Arthur's lesser known knights (Warlord Chronicles). I quite liked the magic in that, because it might not have been magic, just coincidence. I thought that was very skilfully done. I cannot say why the magical elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude irritated me. It might be that if I were Columbian I would have understood the historical allegories.

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I think of magical realism as small interjections of magic in an otherwise normal world and I love it! I haven't read any of the books you mentioned though Kev, so couldn't say if I liked the magical realism in those. Neil Gaiman uses magical realism quite a lot and I love his books.

 

55 minutes ago, France said:

Have you tried Isabel Allende? Or Alice Hoffman.

Alice Hoffman is on my to-read list but I didn't know Isabel Allende wrote magical realism, I though she wrote historical romance! Going to look up her books now :) 

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I was wondering whether the reason I find magical realism jarring is that you usually find it in literary fiction. and literary fiction is supposed to be realistic. You're reading how realistic, although perhaps unusual characters think and react in realistic, although perhaps extreme circumstances. When something impossible happens, you know you are not reading that. Worse, you may wonder what is going on. Is this some symbolism to unpack, or is it just there for the heck of it? Having said that, my favourite book I have read as an adult was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I suppose you could class most of his books as literary fiction, give or take the odd instance of spontaneous combustion. Nevertheless, some parts of Great Expectations seemed rather magical and fairy-tale-like. Miss Haversham could not really have worn the same wedding dress for fifteen years non-stop, nor would her wedding cake have lasted that long. When I was reading it I thought her death seemed rather magical too, although I cannot remember it very well.

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Come to think of it, I wonder if Thomas Hardy's books may have some magic realism. In Test of the d'Urbervilles there were a number of bad omens. In The Woodlanders, Giles Winterbourne has an almost magic touch with the saplings. I cannot think of anything magical or superstitious in Far From the Madding Crowd, but there is some witchcraft in Return of the Native.

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On 31/12/2021 at 2:44 PM, France said:

Have you tried Isabel Allende? Or Alice Hoffman. Both of them write about the real world but with magical elements, Hoffman verges on outright fantasy sometimes but Allende is firmly of this, albeit a slightly skewed, world.

 

No I have not read either. Isabel Allende came up when I did a google search on magic realism.

 

I think it is overt instances of magic that bother me in literary fiction. If a character grows horns out his head, or is levitating off the floor, or is 200 years old, that is difficult to ignore. Imagine you are reading a bit of literary fiction by someone like Anthony Powell or Anne Tyler and suddenly a dog starts speaking, without the character being mentally ill or on drugs. It breaks the mood. If a character sees a ghost or has a tarot card reading that seems to come true at least in part, I could handle that.

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On 12/31/2021 at 4:44 PM, Hayley said:

 

 

Alice Hoffman is on my to-read list but I didn't know Isabel Allende wrote magical realism, I though she wrote historical romance! Going to look up her books now :) 

 Isabel Allende's first book The House of the Spirits is featured on the last episode of Graham Norton's Book Club podcast and there's a really interesting interview with her. She sound like exactly the sort of person I'd love to meet! I know we still have a copy of The House of the Spirits, I'm going to dig it out and reread it.

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 I think it's probably more superstition than actual magic in Hardy's books, as they looked to nature a lot more, and didn't understand, or have an explanation for, a lot of things we have today, such as weather phenomena etc.

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  • 8 months later...

Magical realism is a genre of literature that depicts the real world as having an undercurrent of magic or fantasy. Magical realism is a part of the realism genre of fiction. Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world.

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