> Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922.
Amazing. In school we read the other two authors quite extensively, yet never anything by Asturias.
The double edge of first mover advantage?
Anyway, thankful for the genre and the amazing stories these great writers have left us.
c. the 90s I was taught Asturias and other members of El Boom like Gabriel Cabrera Infante, and Julio Cortázar, and also Borges and Isabel Allende, in English at the undergraduate level...
but that was by a particularly contemporary and enlightened professor of contemporary literature...
Super recommend: Blow-Up and Other Stories by Cortázar and of course for anyone who somehow hasn't read it Borges' Labyrinths... the latter in particular is full of ideas which resonate more ever more significance...
"You should read Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'. It’s only six pages long, and you'll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you." - Douglas Adams
Labyrinth is incredible. It took me a while to grasp it and I still might've missed its point, but it was almost an epiphany like experience for me to understand that knowledge is discovered rather than created. On a fundamental level I've always understood that, but understanding that everything we will ever know as a species already exists as knowledge as is just to be discovered really changed my views.
Edit: can also really recommend The Southern Thruway by Cortázar
I can also recommend Cortázar's "The Southern Thruway" (La autopista del Sur). I read it by accident, more or less, in a short story collection. Still have to read Labyrinths by Borges...
The new(ish) translations from Schocken Editions are a big improvement over what was available in the 20th century. Re-reading The Trial last month was a revelation.
The biggest influence on Marquez, according to Marquez himself, was Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955), which is a masterpiece. Borges considered it one of his favourite books, but it's still almost forgotten in the English-speaking world. Highly recommended to anyone who likes magical realism.
The origins of Magical Realism are (appropriately) obscure:
"German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality." - Bowers, Maggie Ann (2004). Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-26854-7.
Rather than any one person or culture being its source, it may perhaps be better attributed to an aspect of human storytelling since time immemorial.
They are referring to the genesis of the Latin American literary movement commonly referred to as Magical Realism not the general idea of essentially realist stories with magical and fantastic elements which is ancient. Sure we can call most any religious text or mythology Magical Realism but only on the level of plot, literature is more than plot and the way the authors of the movement deal with things like theme and subtext place them firmly into literary fiction, these distinctions are important.
Edit: Thinking on this more, mythology and religion can't really be called Magical Realism from what I have read of the movement, in mythology and religion we know how the trick was done we have a god or some creature who did it even if we can not understand how they did it; in Magical Realism we don't get to know how the trick is done, it is just magic and left unexplained. Even fairy tales and folklore don't work as Magical Realism because they are so tied up in the religion and mythology of the culture that produced them, they can seem magical and unexplained when removed from that culture but that is different. I would not call myself well read in the movement yet so I could be completely wrong here.
I hear Magical Realism and I immediately think of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez! The creators of Lost definitely read that book… the wrecks of ancient ships deep in the jungle, the ghosts of ancestors haunting the present, the way their community narrative evolves out of the mists of story and time. Amazing stuff.
Also, the village of Macondo where the story is set is something quite like the Garden of Eden out of the Book of Genesis, which might qualify as the oldest work of magical realism in existence.
I think there's something in the names of the families and characters that, at least to my younger mind, helped blend some of the magic into a dream-like state of never ending wandering.
"There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages."
― Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review
He's not well known in the English speaking world because barely anyone publishes his books. The translation of his classic Hombres de maiz has been out of print for quite a while and I've never seen an English copy in any book store. Even in Mexico it's fairly difficult to find.
