Tag Archives: Magical Realism

Modern Myths

Modern Myths

The cover of The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood

I have always been fascinated by mythology and, to a lesser extent, the religions surrounding it. Or that created the myths in the first place. Having been raised religious only to eschew that way of life as I get older, as many people in my generation have, I still remember the stories that are part of the mythos of Catholicism*1: God creating the world in seven days*2, Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, The Book of Revelation, and others. These are shared archetypical stories transcending cultures, even if details differ. The Creation Myth*3The Ark*4Divine Intervention*5, and The End of the World as We Know It*6 link with the stories mentioned. With these tales being archetypical, it’s only natural that they get repackaged and repurposed as time passes. Sometimes they’re brought into modern times but maintain the same message or ideas. Other times authors take them in a different direction or focus on characters that were sidelined in the original tale, which is particularly common with female characters. These rewrites can be serioussatiricalfeministdrive home An Aesop*7, or just stories that use mythology as a jumping-off point for something otherwise original.

Continue reading

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel Garcia MárquezI don’t even remember the original reason I added One Hundred Years of Solitude to my to-read list, whence I heard or read the title, but I get the feeling it’s one of those novels that everyone has sort of heard about in passing if not already read. It might help that García Márquez was a Nobel Prize winner. I almost get the feeling that even just mentioning the title gets you a sort of look from a certain crowd. Kind of like casually mentioning that you read Proust, or love Dostoevsky*, I think. Anyway, I finally read it sometime last year and the moment I finished it, I wanted to return to the beginning once more and traverse those one hundred years all over again from page one. Alas, there was a hold.

I’m not sure how to describe this beautiful novel other than that it is a world unto itself, like a drawstring bag that encloses the universe and lets only sands of it out as you read the tale. And every time I recall its cover I think of a verdant snowglobe, an entire universe about to implode upon itself then settle into a meditative state of non-being, rather than recalling the open collage of forest elements that actually constitutes the cover. My interpretation of the book of course influences my memory of the cover, just as surely as my judging of each book’s cover influences my reading of the book itself, and it’s precisely this impression that García Márquez’s** writing invokes – I suppose that’s what the genre “magical realism” refers to. How do I even begin to describe the novel? How do I describe the plot? How to tell you if you haven’t already read it, don’t already understand the sort of spell I’ve been put under by One Hundred Years of Solitude? Well I suppose I better try, now that I’ve started.

The tale follows the Buendía family, but I don’t know if that’s what I should be telling you. I want to talk rather about the style of writing, how there’s magic imbued in everyday life and how these occurrences are treated as, if not mundane, then nothing in particular to be frightened of. By all accounts, there is a lack of logic in how things happen, and yet – and yet. You’re drawn into the impossibility of the silly premise that the child born of a union between cousins should have the tail of a pig, in a world where this could actually happen, because this is a reality where mustard plasters prevent pregnancy and girls can be so beautiful as to drive all those who gaze upon her mad. Premonitions and fortunes told carry so much more weight for the inhabitants of García Márquez’s world than they might for most of ours outside of his pages, and the only way I can describe it is as though we were to float through an ocean of fog, the only thing keeping us afloat our willing suspension of disbelief – no, there’s something stronger in the air: it must be magic.

Continue reading