Magical Realism

Magical Realism: Gabriel García Márquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

POSTED APRIL 6, 2020

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927 - 2014) was the greatest Latin American writer of the 20th century and the most renowned of the "magical realists". In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". When he passed away in 2014 at the age of 87, tributes poured in from around the world for the beloved author.

And beloved he was, especially in his native country. García Márquez was an exile from Colombia for most of his adult life, mostly self-imposed, as a result of his anger and frustration over the violence that was taking over his country. In the late 1990's, I was in Cartagena, where García Márquez maintained a home even during his travels abroad. Painted on a rock wall a short walk from the Caribbean were the words "Te amo Gabo". Originally a law student, "Gabo" turned to journalism and eventually to fiction. His breakout novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. He counted Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro among his many admirers. Because of his outspoken anti-imperialist and leftist views, García Márquez was denied travel visas to the US for many years until Clinton lifted the ban.

The term magical realism was originally applied to art in 1925 by a German art critic, who meant "to create an art category that strayed from the strict guidelines of realism...The term did not name an artistic movement until the 1940's in Latin America and the Caribbean."(1) Magical realism became a literary style of choice for Latin American writers from the 1940's on. They were the ones to first popularize it though it has spread to many other countries.

One of the simplest definitions of magical realism is that it's a "literary style that weaves threads of fantasy into a depiction of everyday life."(2)

One Hundred Years of Solitude has been called the quintessential work of magical realism. Set in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the multi-generational story of the Buendia family, whose patriarch founded the town. Besides its mix of everyday events with the magical and supernatural, it tells a story of Colombia from the early 1800's to the mid 1900's. Foreign-owned fruit plantations, labor unrest, and civil war all feature in the novel. Even more broadly, it tells the story of "Latin America’s struggles with colonialism and with its own emergence into modernity". Magic realism suffuses the novel with the line between reality and unreality blurred and where "the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as...extraordinary"(3) Some examples from the book: ghosts that visit the townspeople, a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate, a child born with a pig's tail, an insomnia plague, and a gypsy who "had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malaysian archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan."

After 100 Years of Solitude burst on the scene - it has sold more than 45 million copies (4) and has been translated into 37 languages - magical realism became popular with writers outside Latin America. Salman Rushdie used fantastical elements to tell India's origin story in Midnight's Children. Toni Morrison added touches of the supernatural to write about the horrors of slavery in America in Beloved.(1)

As for me, I'm going to revisit Gabo's classic and then try a few of the "essential, spell-binding books" of magic realism (link below left) and in the Vox article (link below right).

References: (1) Vox (2) Discovery (blog) at reedsy.com (3) "Magic Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude" (4) The Atlantic