Castro and Gabino Iglesias, whose work cannot be neatly encompassed by that term.
But even there, I feel the magic realism label subtly erases the efforts of an emerging group of horror writers, such as V. The genre seems to have more of a life among second- and third- generation Latin American writers living in the United States or Britain. This doesn’t mean everyone has stopped writing magic realism. Many genre authors are increasingly immersed in what might be called a Gothic or suspense epoch. I also feel it primes editors to hunt for a magic realist output that is rare in modern Latin America.
When a work is described as magic realist, the picture it typically evokes is that of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But if you use the phrase to talk about “Eartheater” - a recent Argentine novel by Dolores Reyes about a young woman who dwells in a slum and has visions of missing people - the result would be jarring. We both find it baffling, since it ties our work to the literature of our grandparents, obliterating time and space and geographical differences to create one single, lumpy category.īut does it matter what we call Latin American literature? Isn’t a rose by any other name just as sweet? In my experience, it matters because categories create expectations.
I’ve spoken to Mariana Enriquez, the award-winning author of “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,” a couple of times about this expansive label. Picture every work by a British writer being called “Austenesque” today, and you get an idea of this phenomenon. Magic realism once referred to the literary style of a loosely connected group of Latin American authors who penned works some 60 years ago, but in the English-speaking world, the term has become synonymous with Latin American writing in general. Once, someone called my work “science fiction magic realism,” a term that continues to puzzle me to this day. Throughout my career, I’ve had the words “magic realism” lobbed at everything I’ve written. I once joked that I chose the title “Mexican Gothic” for my sixth novel with the hope that people would say it was a Gothic novel instead of a magic realist one. Lens is a close look at an emerging global trend or insight through creative narrative. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page. This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.
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