Does Hungers Brides employ elements of magic realism?
García Márquez was one who always refused the term as it was applied to his work. He was given too much credit, in his view, for his powers of imagination. He went so far as to say that in his work he’d never made anything up. That if one was prepared to look carefully enough, the everyday reality of life in Latin America held magic enough for anyone. My own view lies closer to one expressed by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. “Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function…” But I might take this a step beyond what I took him to be arguing – to say that reality and imagination are neither clearly separable nor indeed distinct. This is true in two quite different respects. First, in the sense laid bare by Heisenberg’s work in quantum physics: narrowly, that the act of observing modifies, i
