Magic Realism and the Latin American Boom: Authors & Stages

Stages

• 1940 — Beginning of the narrative
• 1960 — Latin American Boom
• 1980 — Consecration of the Narrative

Magic Realism

Magic realism appeared in the 1940s in an atmosphere of complete renovation and is the result of the mixture of cultures, peoples, and languages... which led to cultural syncretism in Latin America.

Features

• Logical alteration of reality.
• Survival of indigenous and Afro-American cosmogonies (belief systems).
• Consideration of myth as a valid category to explain the world.

Along with the concept of magical realism, Alejo Carpentier, in his work 'The Kingdom of This World', presents the marvelous as intrinsic to American reality. In this perspective, magical realism is the mode that embodies fantasy within everyday life. Featured authors: Miguel Ángel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier.

Boom

The Boom refers to a group of young Hispanic writers from different countries who, beginning in the 1960s, published many novels that became highly successful.

Authors

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was one of the most erudite writers of the time; he enjoyed fantasy and detective fiction. One of his best-known works is 'Aleph', which is a prime example of his skill as a storyteller.

Lezama Lima

Lezama Lima is noted as the founder of an influential magazine comparable to Origen. Examples of his works: 'The Death of Narcissus' and 'Analeptic Clock', but he gained his greatest fame with 'Paradiso', a very complex and autobiographical novel that became one of the most important novels of American literature in Castilian.

Juan Carlos Onetti

Works: 'The Shipyard' and 'Body Snatcher'. The characters in this type of work live in absolute solitude and lack communication.

Julio Cortázar

'Rayuela' is an open book divided into three parts, offering the reader several interpretations. It is a puzzle in which the reader can recombine sections as they wish.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Notable is his work 'The City and the Dogs', which depicts hazing at a military academy in Peru. He employed several avant-garde techniques, including interior monologue. Other works: 'Captain Pantoja and the' — a humorous and critical novel about the military — and 'World War', which is noted here as the only one of his novels that is not set in Peru.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most important Hispanic novelists. In 1958 he published one of his early significant books, 'No One Writes to the Colonel', but it was 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' that brought him worldwide fame. This novel takes place in an invented town called Macondo, which gradually grows into a fully realized city. The Buendía family experiences a saga that echoes the history of mankind, mixing love and hate, reality and fantasy. Also notable are 'The Autumn of the Patriarch', which explores solitude and the tyranny of dictatorship, and 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold', which examines the tragic destiny of a man subjected to social prejudice.