 |
| Illustration by: MissABeet |
When I was at college, I met a friend whose parents lived in South America. She had been living there too, on and off, and she introduced me to ‘The House of The Spirits’ by Isabel Allende. I had never read anything like it. Magic, clairvoyance, telekinesis, spirits and love affairs sit comfortably side by side with politics, rape, murder, torture and corruption and you are left with the eerie impression that those supernatural elements existed all along; we just haven’t noticed them yet.
My friend, who shares a name with the chief protagonist of this novel, excitingly invited me to Venezuela and I packed ‘Of Love and Shadows’ for the plane ride. And it was easy to see how such a genre of contrasts might emerge from such a place of extremes and polarities: the roads were so jammed in Caracas that only certain car number plates were allowed on the roads on certain days; the countryside was so vast and uncluttered that you could sling your hammock on a magical beach and see no other living souls for the rest of the day. You could gaze up at the mountains and know you could be staring at spaces devoid of living breath.
That visit began a tradition for me: novels of Magical Realism provided the ideal punctuation mark between the laborious, grim grind of everyday life and some unknown, far away destination. I think it also marked the point where I stopped looking for myself in literature; there was almost nothing I could relate to in Allende’s fiction, and that was the whole point of reading it. It was a relief to allow my boring self to dissolve into the lives of the poverty-stricken, violent but spiritually enriched, supernaturally charged characters of her novels. I didn’t want to see myself in a novel; I was trying to leave myself behind.
After Allende, I broadened my reading to Garbriel Garcia Marquez and then I was delighted to discover Louis de Bernieres, who wrote South American based magical realism before his famous ‘Captain Correlli.’ (I was always disappointed that there was no real ghost in ‘Correlli’. I had been hunting for the magic all the way through, but I guess the love affair was magic enough.) These books took my mind off the journey (I hate planes!) and prepared me for the ‘other’ at the end of it: promises of chattering cicadas, flickering fireflies, fruit from the trees and dancing outside, but also reminders that these places might have memories thick with violence, poverty and misery.
I stopped reading magical realism at some point, which is why I haven’t said much about excellent writers like Haruki Murakami, who adopt many of the features of the genre. But I think I may start again now. I reckon my real life could do with a little bit of magic from those far away places.
My top magically real reads:
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Of Love and Shadows by Isabelle Allende
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Senor Vivo and the Coco Lord by Louis de Bernieres
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
My friend, who shares a name with the chief protagonist of this novel, excitingly invited me to Venezuela and I packed ‘Of Love and Shadows’ for the plane ride. And it was easy to see how such a genre of contrasts might emerge from such a place of extremes and polarities: the roads were so jammed in Caracas that only certain car number plates were allowed on the roads on certain days; the countryside was so vast and uncluttered that you could sling your hammock on a magical beach and see no other living souls for the rest of the day. You could gaze up at the mountains and know you could be staring at spaces devoid of living breath.
That visit began a tradition for me: novels of Magical Realism provided the ideal punctuation mark between the laborious, grim grind of everyday life and some unknown, far away destination. I think it also marked the point where I stopped looking for myself in literature; there was almost nothing I could relate to in Allende’s fiction, and that was the whole point of reading it. It was a relief to allow my boring self to dissolve into the lives of the poverty-stricken, violent but spiritually enriched, supernaturally charged characters of her novels. I didn’t want to see myself in a novel; I was trying to leave myself behind.
After Allende, I broadened my reading to Garbriel Garcia Marquez and then I was delighted to discover Louis de Bernieres, who wrote South American based magical realism before his famous ‘Captain Correlli.’ (I was always disappointed that there was no real ghost in ‘Correlli’. I had been hunting for the magic all the way through, but I guess the love affair was magic enough.) These books took my mind off the journey (I hate planes!) and prepared me for the ‘other’ at the end of it: promises of chattering cicadas, flickering fireflies, fruit from the trees and dancing outside, but also reminders that these places might have memories thick with violence, poverty and misery.
I stopped reading magical realism at some point, which is why I haven’t said much about excellent writers like Haruki Murakami, who adopt many of the features of the genre. But I think I may start again now. I reckon my real life could do with a little bit of magic from those far away places.
My top magically real reads:
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Of Love and Shadows by Isabelle Allende
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Senor Vivo and the Coco Lord by Louis de Bernieres
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
No comments:
Post a Comment