Magical Realism

1. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967

This follows the seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo. The inhabitants of Macondo seem both blessed and cursed. Perhaps doomed by the curiosities and proclivities of the Buendia family, they also are exposed to the magic that comes with such solitude, strange inventions often brought to Macondo by a team of traveling gypsies, who introduce the Macondians to flying carpets and the invention of ice. Elements of fantasy include suicides who reappear because they are thirsty; women who ascend to heaven; and an entire town struck with insomnia. Throughout this tale of Macondo’s trials and tribulations, civil war rages around the country.

2. “The House of Spirits”, by Isabel Allende, 1982

Chronicling four generations of the Trueba family; this begins with young Clara predicting a death in the family – shortly after, her older sister, Rosa the Beautiful, who has yellow eyes and shockingly green hair, dies. Clara blames herself and decides never to speak again. Rosa’s fiancé decides to aid the hacienda, but although he makes it a “model” home he also develops the habit of raping peasant girls. Various plot turns throughout the novel lead the reader from a time of socialist government, to revolution, to military dictatorship. Along the way, the main characters are the otherworldly Trueba women, ending with Alba, who becomes a revolutionary.

3. “Midnight’s Children”, by Salman Rushdie, 1981

This allegorical novel is a historical chronicle of India centering on the inextricably linked fates of children born within the first hour of independence from Great Britain. At midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two boys are born in a Bombay hospital, where they are accidentally switched by a nurse. Saleem Sinai, the narrator, is a Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Saleem, looking back, explains that 1,001 children were born on this auspicious night, and that all were endowed with special powers. Saleem’s is telepathy, and he is able to connect all the other children. Ultimately, “Midnight’s Children” pits Saleem against Shiva, with whom he was switched. Set within the thirty years following independence, Rushdie places “midnight’s children” as central to the political developments of these years, including Indira Gandhi’s ascendancy. This won the Booker Prize in 1981, among others.

4. “The God of Small Things”, by Arundhati Roy, 1997

Narrated from the point of view of young twins Rahel and Estha, “The God of Small Things” is set in Kerala, India during the late 1960s when Communism began to rattle the caste system. Shifting back and forth between the 1993 (the present) and 1969, this recounts the experiences that led up to the death of their cousin Sophie Mol and leads to irreparable shattering in the twins’ family. “The God of Small Things” won the Booker Prize in 1997.

Commentary: Magical realism, as defined by wikipedia, is “an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting.”

In all of these novels, magical, marvelous, or impossible events intersect with the lives of families, often against a background of both political and familial unrest. A few ways in which these novels connect: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “The House of Spirits” are both Latin-American novels, spanning generations; while “One Hundred Years of Solitude” concentrates on the patriarchs, and “The House of Spirits” on the matriarchs, both are set in a similar place, and are quite connected in the manner of their fantastical elements and their backdrop of civil war. Both “Midnight’s Children” and “The God of Small Things” are novels by Indian writers; while Rushdie’s certainly has more magical (i.e., impossible) elements, they are similar in their focus on a set of children, and again the country that these children meet their fates in. Both “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Midnight’s Children” are larger books – denser and more complex. All four serve well as wonderfully readable examples of this genre – in which manifestations are both set against and grafted onto a real world, corrupted with upheavals and instability.