m a g i c a l r e a l i s m s u r v e y
1. Do you have a favorite MR book or story? Tell us about it.ANONYMOUS, publisher/editor, London, England
ANONYMOUS, retired journalist/translator/researcher/film production, FranceDark Matter, volumes 1 and 2.
ANONYMOUS, retired dentist/medical educator, Newport, RIMy favourite authors are Kafka, Ismaël Kadare (Albanian), Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez. Although their existential adventures differ enormously, they seem to share an active imagination and the talent to choose words and phrasing that keep the reader under a spell, so that he becomes a partner eager to glide into a foreign mentalscape. The experience is often a significant one. The style, I feel, remains essential.
CAROLYN BEASLEY, writer/creative writing teacher, Victoria, AustraliaSaudade.
carolynmareebeasley@excite.com
PAT BERGERON, dreamer/explorer/research secretary, Ann Arbor, MII love Australian author Delia Falconer's novel, The Service of Clouds.It is 1907. A photographer in the Blue Mountains of Australia photographs clouds. In these clouds the locals see images of the events and passions that make up their lives. During war the clouds reveal a dreadnought; during love affairs the clouds reflect the mountain's mysterious blue glow. As Eureka tells us the story of a town's romance with clouds, her own romance with the photographer unfolds until war, disease and the inhabitant's cynicism make the clouds fade.
From the blurb:
"Harry Kitchings fell in love with the clouds and stayed. Les Curtin began to feel the dusk in his lungs. It was a romantic year. Men carried thermometers and dreamed of women struck by lightning. Postmen hauled packets filled with love and human hair. Women carried notebooks and pressed storms in them like flowers. You could feel our love rising from the mountain tops."
pcarolb@umich.edu
BILL BEVERLY, professor at Trinity CollegeNo.
CHRIS DOERFLER, attorney/wannabe screenwriter, Phoenix, AZYuri Olesha's "Lyompa"—I like the way that MR helps envision and bring meaning to death. [Tobias] Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" works similarly.
cadoerfler@cox.netLOUIS GALLO, professor of English, Radford University, Radford, VAI personally like writing about the intersection between magical realism and theoretical physics. It seems to me amazing that a very serious field of science is telling us that the universe consists of eleven dimensions, time doesn’t really exist, everything burst out of nothing, and there are probably an infinite number of other universes just like ours from which we are separated by a distance of less than an atom. According to modern physics, anything really is possible, and it is more or less only because we choose to see things in a limited way that we don’t see greater and more bizarre things.
LAURA HORSLEY, high-school teacher, Houston, TXBY FAR, One Hundred Years of Solitude (close second with the varied works of Louise Erdrich). I took a bus trip from New Orleans once to San Francisco and planned to see the country. I started Solitude right outside New Orleans, could not put it down, missed the entire country while reading it.
MARIO HERRERA, student/University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NMTlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges. By chance, a man happens upon a lone fictitious entry (on the country of Uqbar) in an encyclopedia. He relates a quotation from the article to some friends, one of whom then attempts to consult the work. The friend searches other sources in vain for further information on Uqbar; two years later he discovers a more startling fabrication, an encyclopedia of Tlon, a universe created by a loosely connected society of individuals who work in isolation to provide fictitious articles for the Tlonian encyclopedia. This encyclopedia becomes known to the world, and the world gradually falls under the sway of the peculiar cosmology of Tlon. The central idea to the story is that thought creates reality and that ideas, ultimately, create changes to the material world.
riodude@unm.eduCAROLIVIA HERRON, novelist, Washington DCMy favorite book may be Old Rosa by Reinaldo Arenas, although my favorite is always changing. I like the style, and culturally I can somewhat relate to the storyline. Its approach toward sexuality and gender roles is also quite intriguing. I also very much enjoyed Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan.
Carolivia@carolivia.orgDAVID INKEY, poet and philosopher (the UN Poet)Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, a retelling of the coming of the Mediterranean people to the Americas. I changed my life to make myself into a novelist after reading this novel.
unpoet@aol.com
KATIE, graduate student/English teacher, Richmond, VAPeter Rabbit.
SONDRA KELLY-GREEN, writer, Willamina, ORLike Water for Chocolate, The Shipping News, Holes, The Time Traveler’s Wife. I love looking for magical realism—it truly is everywhere!
veniceitaly@excite.com
KATIE KLEIN, librarian"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges would probably have to be my pick. I remember reading it at the time and thinking—there it is—the story that has it all. (Literally.) Not only does it have a whisper of wonder and an all-encompassing eerie element to it, it also has some wacky snarkiness about the painful world of seeing your peers published while you keep getting those rejection notices you sent away for. (I think it was PJ O’Rourke who said, “It is not enough to succeed. Your friends must also fail.”) I did a sort of gestalt on the story, which was a requirement of my MFA program at Antioch, and the resulting piece, "Burning Mary," won two literary awards and was published in Peregrine’s 25th anniversary edition. This was in the late 90s and I don’t think I’ve written a better story since.
SANDRA MADDUX-CREECH, laid-off account manager, Wellington, CONights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Fevvers is a circus aerialist with giant birdlike wings. She weaves the story to a journalist who has come to discover how she actually performs. He came looking to prove her fraudulence, but instead she pulls him into her fantastic world.
madduxcreech@msn.com
HERMINE MEINHARD, poet/writing teacher, New York, NYThe Cabbages Are Chasing The Rabbits by Arnold Adoff, though technically, it's poetry "for children," which seems to mean that it has pictures. It's about a day when all the roles on earth go topsy-turvy. It's an inspirational, thought-provoking, funny read.
herminem@earthlink.net
LETTIE PRELL, Des Moines, IAOne Hundred Years of Solitude was the first I read, and it's still my favorite, perhaps for sheer violence of the shock of reading it the first time that has stayed with me… maybe it's just my favorite story… the wildest, strangest and most violent of García Márquez.
ROBERT PREUSS, writer, Saratoga Springs, NYGabriel García Márquez: Innocent Erendira
JOHN PROHASKA, Winnipeg, ManitobaSeeing Things, by Charlotte Painter, published by Random House in 1976, opened my eyes to new possibilities in fiction… as some reviewers have put it, bringing the subconscious to life in the form of visions, characters… wickedly funny… skewering the clumsiness of the manifestation of the New Age movement… it's that interplay between realism and what would ordinarily be the 'unseen' that makes it work as magical realism while, at the same time, the book is satirical somewhat in the manner of Vonnegut. The book had, and continues to have, a sense of immediacy about it and it deserves far, far greater attention.
johnprohaska2000@yahoo.ca
KEN RAND, writer/part-time library shelver, West Jordan, UTYes. Predictably, One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favourite. Beyond being the most notable MR creation, I feel it actually defines the genre. When I think of MR, I think of this novel, and it is the benchmark against which I compare all subsequent forays into the genre (however unfair that may be).
KRand27577@aol.com
JEAN MARIE RIQUELME, poet, Green Bay, WIAlice in Wonderland. I first heard this story when I was a child, and I've read it dozens of times since. It fired my imagination like nothing else.
MELANIE RIVERA, student, Washington DCJuan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo; Julio Cortázar's Final Exam; Jose Donoso's El Obsceno Parajo de la Noche; and, probably, number one is Don Quijote.
mr5831a@american.edu
GARRETT ROWLAN, subteacher, Los Angeles, CASalman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
growlan@jps.net
KELLEY WHITE, pediatrician, Philadelphia, PAMy favorite MR book is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I also like Ishiguro's The Unconsoled very much, which I don't know is considered hard core magic realism. I had reviewed it as a founding Irrealist work for The Cafe Irreal. But these categories tend to blur.
KelleyWhiteMD@Yahoo.com
CAROL ZAPATA-WHELAN, university instructor, Hispanic Lit/writer, Clovis, CA, USA/ArgentinaThe Obscene Bird of Night.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. I'm sure most readers of Margin know this work, one of the greatest novels in the Spanish language, extending Cervantes's idealism, humor, absurdity, pragmatism—magic—all in response to the desperation of an age. Because I don't think I can say anything new about that novel, I hope I can take this space up in another related direction: Currently, Latin America is producing a generation of new writers who are deliberately "exiling" (in Spanish they use the word desterrar—"to take out of the land") Magical Realism, claiming it does not address Latin America's current reality (one that is more "virtual" than "magical") . This new writing reflects the globalized world of McDonald's, not Macondo (One Hundred Years of Solitude). An anthology edited a few years ago by Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean writer who lived in the U.S., is consequently, entitled McOndo. And there is a university course, "From Macondo to McOndo," that explores this move away from the mix of myth and history and politics that has been part of Magical Realism in Latin America. While writers like Isabel Allende still say that fiction (and magical realism) in fiction can reflect the why's of history better than journalism, the new writers are moving away from such ideology. I suspect this movement won't last, as literature in Latin America has always been, to some degree or another, a narrative of history and politics, hyperbole and irreality since the first letters of the conquistadors. I wonder what other readers think about the above? I have no interest, personally, in reading about McDonald's in Argentina, for example (though hamburgers there do taste like real beef!).margin home | contents | links | reading list | marginalia | contributors | staff | guidelines | kudos | subscriptions | contact us
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