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- [00:00]
A
Every holiday shopper's got a list. But Ross shoppers, you've got a mission like a gift run that turns into a disco, snow globe, throw pillows and PJs for the whole family.
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B
Dog included.
- [00:09]
A
At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more. It's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic.
- [00:16]
B
With Black Friday savings at the Home Depot, you can get up to $1,400 off, plus get free delivery on select appliances like LG, America's most reliable line of appliances. Check out the newest LG refrigerator with new mini craft ice straight from the dispenser. Shop Black Friday savings on select LG appliances, plus get free delivery now at the Home Depot. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $396 or more. Offer valid 11. 5 through 12, 3 US only. See store online for details. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [00:51]
A
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.
- [00:53]
B
And who do we have back with us, Rebecca?
- [00:55]
A
We have Vanessa Diaz, our managing editor. She's going to be here with us more regularly because y' all have really enjoyed our deep dives into literary history. We've talked about Edgar Allan Poe. We have talked about Agatha Christie. I don't know what we're talking about today, but Vanessa is going to take us on a journey. Vanessa, welcome back.
- [01:13]
C
Thank you.
- [01:13]
D
It's been really great to do this. I'm glad we're getting some nice responses to me just coming on and me like, hi, can I. Can I join the party?
- [01:20]
A
I mean, if we know anything about the book nerds, it's that they like a deep dive, we like a rabbit hole, and we like some literary gossip. I think it's underrated.
- [01:30]
C
I agree. Cool.
- [01:31]
D
I can't wait to hit y' all with our next topic, which I don't know how much y'.
- [01:35]
B
All.
- [01:35]
D
Well, I know how you. I guess because I listen to the show, but, like, how much you preview the, like, stuff you're going to talk about on zero to well read. But because I'm going to be Kool Aid manning into an episode of that in the nearest future, I that inspired today's topic tangentially, which is to talk about magical realism. Just because I still see so much confusion about what that is, what it isn't, who gets to call their work magical realism, how it came to be, folks that don't know. It was a whole literary movement. So we're going to talk about that today.
- [02:03]
A
Exciting.
- [02:04]
D
Cool. So I like to always do this at the top of the shows. But what is. Well, you can answer one of two questions because we're obviously going to do a definition of magical realism. But what do you know about magical realism? Or even just like the history of Latin American literature, which is obviously a huge question, but you know, answer how you will.
- [02:19]
A
I'm going to cede this to Jeff and throw him on the. You used to teach literary classes.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, so I used to know more about this than I do, Vanessa. But my mental index card essentially goes like this is that magical realism is a specific term for a particular kind of book and writing that appeared in South America. Like I want to say the mid 20th century, maybe a little bit later. I don't really know. Most associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And so the primary feature, and one reason it has been, I guess, appropriated by other kinds of books or like it's a useful term because it describes a real, mostly realistic book with one generally one fairly light and specific instance of something that shouldn't. That is non logical, illogical, that is outside the bounds of sort of normal Newtonian, even quantum physics at this point. So that's what I. But so something like classically the thing that people want to do is apply to say something like by Toni Morrison, right. In Beloved, which is if that was written by someone in Bolivia about something down there would maybe be more directly called magical realism. I don't know. But just because. Has a structural element. There's also something else going on politically. In the Time of Butterflies there's a bunch of these that go on. But it's using this technique that has ported and has appeared in other places. Like we're going to be doing A Christmas Carol. Right. Like it has one relatively significant one, but it's mostly. It's set in a realistic world with the intervention and incursion of the supernatural divine. So did I get close? I'm just, I'm saying the same thing over and over again. But how close?
- [03:57]
D
You did great. You did great. Yeah.
- [03:59]
A
I've never considered A Christmas Carol to be adjacent to magic realism. So that's interesting.
- [04:05]
D
Well, this is why this conversation is so interesting, right? Because like the definition, I'm going to be the first one to tell you all. Like, I know about this because I have studied it to some degree as just like a person who likes books, but I'm not, you know, a scholar on it. And even those who are. It's like this definition definition gets very, very blurry. Even the definition of like. There are plenty of folks who do include like people like Toni Morrison in that canon because she's at least still an author of color. So we're gonna get into all of that. But if you just go by the basic, basic definition that Jeff kind of gave, which is like, okay, a story that's grounded in reality where like, this one not real thing happens that everybody just sort of accepts as being normal. That can apply to so many.
- [04:40]
A
Yeah, that's the sort of definition that I first heard someone give casually of like, you're in the real world, but like, your dead grandma shows up to dinner and it's normal. And like, that may be one of.
- [04:51]
D
The actual examples I have written down somewhere, actually.
- [04:54]
B
Well, I think that normal and fine is interesting because it's not like a horde. Like, everyone's freaked out. Like, there's a certain everydayness, and I probably. Of the people listening to show, they probably have. The beloved is for most people, the one that they've read, I'm guessing that.
- [05:07]
A
Has an element like this Garcia Marquez, probably.
- [05:10]
B
Yeah, I guess. But it's like, clearly it's disturbing, but it's not like a panic inducing situation that Seth is having these experiences. Right. It's sort of normal. Is not quite right. But accepted.
- [05:25]
D
Yeah, it was like, it's panic inducing because the thing that's happening is like, oh, but the fact that it's happening isn't really called into question, if that makes sense. Like, everybody's like, yeah, that. Yes, the dead. But, you know, Scooby Doo, get to.
- [05:35]
B
The bottom of this here ghost or something. Exactly.
- [05:37]
D
It's just like, well, here's the ghost. Now let me, like, interrogate all the way.
- [05:40]
C
So.
- [05:41]
D
Yeah.
- [05:41]
A
Or like a more contemporary example. I hear the term used a lot for Colson Whitehead's Underground railroad.
- [05:47]
D
Yes.
- [05:48]
A
Where there's a literal railroad, an actual railroad.
- [05:53]
D
Yeah.
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A
That just functions the way that a railroad would function, for the most part under the ground. Whereas it, you know, in real life was a metaphor. But folks aren't like, alarmed or surprised or, you know, even. They don't even remark on it.
- [06:06]
B
But I think that's actually alternate history, Vanessa, because the train itself is not supernatural. People say that's the blurriness.
- [06:14]
D
Okay, Vanessa, this is absolutely established.
- [06:16]
B
The blurriness.
- [06:16]
D
Yep. It's so blurry. Well, we can't really get to magical realism without doing, and I will say, a very, very brief history of just like what Latin American literature has looked like. But we are going to do a brief one. I was putting this together when Danica actually messaged me to say, hey, have you seen this PBS Crash Course. And I started laughing because I was already working on this episode when I saw that they were doing this. And it's with a creator that I really enjoy. So if you do want to know more about Latin American history, you should definitely check that out again. It's called Crash Course to Latin American Literature. I think it's going to be like a 10 part series. Only two of the episodes are out. Curly Velazquez is doing it. And it's just a lot. It's both funny and informative and they're like little 12 minute episodes. But so the term Latin American, we're gonna start right there first. Just because we're gonna keep using some of these terms throughout is in and of itself debated as far as the origins of it go and also the appropriateness of its use. It first appears in the mid, like 19th century. And there's two general sources people like to point out here. One is that it was the French, specifically this philosopher and economist named Michel Chevalier who was using it as a way to kind of get people on the side of like the French and the like. People in these Latin American, now we're calling them Latin American countries are all, we are one we are, we speak the same Romance language. And so we should conquer. I mean we should collaborate. And really it was just like a ploy for Napoleon III's cause because he was absolutely on his imperialism kick. And so using the term was meant to be a like unification, but for all the wrong reasons of like, this is why, like you should be open to being part of the French Empire. And then option two, which is documented, which is a Chilean politician named Francisco Bilbao used it in a speech in 1856, also unifying, but for a different reason. And it was wanting to take this region of folks with this shared linguistic and cultural heritage and encourage them to unify for the purposes of collective resistance to imperialism and the fight for independence. So like, same idea, like unification, but for very different purposes. But that's where we start to see the word Latin American show up in literature as a term. To this day it is still controversial and not necessarily settled law, because for some it is a flattening right of this very rich, diverse, distinct set of cultures and languages and peoples who were colonized. And then others see it as this unification of like, hey, there is beauty in the fact that we all have some stuff in common in addition to all of our uniqueness. Which just to do a very quick sidecar because this is also a thing I see confused a lot. The difference between. And I'll mostly be using the term Latin American today, but there's Latin and Latin American and then there's Hispanic. And I still get questions in like DMs all the time about, well, what is the difference? Very, very broadly speaking, to be Latino, Latina, or if we're going for the gender neutral forms, is Latin or Latinx, is that you are from a country in Latin America. So the definition I just gave, whereas Hispanic means that you're from a Spanish speaking country. And those two things are not necessarily the same. Spaniards, for example, can be people of color, but just by definition, like Spain is not a Latin American country, but it is a Hispanic country. So that's where like that little gap exists. Because I still get that question all the time. For the purposes of this discussion, geographically, we're talking about the group of countries that stretches from Mexico to Central America all the way to the tip of South America, a couple other islands in there. Spiritually, technically, the term that we'll use is countries that have a shared history of colonization by Spain or Portugal who went on to establish their independence. So that's Latin American knowledge.
- [09:46]
A
And folks, if this is really ringing your bells, Vanessa writes our Latin A Lit newsletter. So you can also subscribe to that and learn all about it.
- [09:55]
D
Yes, I talk about it fairly often just because it is a question we still get. And that's fine. Not everybody knows. So Latin American literature, again, this is going to be kind of a really, really high level. But colonization is this 300 some off year project. And of course it forever alters the landscape of this region. So unsurprisingly, when literature and other forms of art begin to emerge from the region, everyone's left with these questions about identity in the wake of colonization. These are questions and themes that we see explored. Simon Bolivar is one of the earliest examples of modern Latin American literature. And I say modern because clearly the indigenous peoples of this entire region had this really rich oral history of storytelling that eventually gets made into stuff like the Popol Vu. But there's also just so much that's lost because again, colonization. I'm just going to repeatedly point to the fact of erasure. There's but Bolivar, who is this politician and revolutionary leader, helped establish the independence of countries like Colombia and Panama, Ecuador and I think Venezuela. And he wrote this famous work called Carta de Jamaica, a letter to Jamaica while in exile there, where he's arguing for Latin American independence and saying that he hopes that this is something that we can achieve in his lifetime. But Also just calls attention to this question of how do we move forward? We are no longer the indigenous peoples that we once were, though we retain parts of that. We are not Europeans and we don't want to be. How do we move forward with something new? And you know, again, huge summary here, but revolution happens, so we're not going to go into that because that's not the focus of this episode. But independence is secured. This is a topic way too big to cover here. The TLDR is war, right? Like the countries of Latin America do eventually become independent from Spain, or in Brazil's case, Portugal in the wars of independence, between like 1810 and 1825, it's a struggle, there's hard times, It's a period of a lot of unrest. But eventually we get what now shapes Latin American countries. And the themes that I talked about there of like questioning identity are ones that we see specifically in the Latin American literature boom of the 1960s. So this is what Jeff, I was close. You were exactly. Yeah, that's what I was about to say.
- [12:00]
B
I really put myself on the line there. I was hoping to get within 25 years.
- [12:04]
D
No, you did great.
- [12:06]
A
And it's interesting and unusual to have, like, not even a trope, like a whole sub genre of literature or like a technique of literature connected to a political idea in this way. Is magical realism, like, the only one? It seems like it's one of the few.
- [12:25]
D
You just got to one of the cruxes of this episode. So we're gonna get to that in just a second.
- [12:29]
A
I will take my gold star.
- [12:30]
D
Yes. You both get your stars for timing and thematic appropriate accuracy.
- [12:36]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by Del Rey, publisher of silver cloak. By L.K. stephen. Hell Bent on avenging her parents murders, Saffron Killeran lies her way into Silver Cloak Academy, a training ground for elite detectives with a single goal. To bring the ruthless Blood Moons to justice. But when Saf's deception is exposed, she's given a rare opportunity to go undercover and tear the Blood Moons down from the inside. Descending into a world where pleasure and pain are the most powerful currencies, Saf must commit some truly heinous deeds to keep her cover and her life. And each day tests her loyalties further. And one false step could destroy everyone she's ever loved. So there's a lot going on here. Like, in the best way, Silver Cloak is the perfect fall read to sweep you away. There's a cat and mouse romance, a magic system powered by pleasure and pain, which I have not ever seen personally and morally gray characters. Make sure to check out Silver Cloak by LK Stephen. And thanks again to Delray for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook 100 Rules for Living to 100 An Optimist's Guide to a Happy Life by Dick Van Dyke. Read by Tom Bergeron and Dick Van Dyke. On the eve of his 100th birthday, National Treasure Dick Van Dyke brings us this autobiographical collection of stories, reflections and life advice on how he's maintained a zest for life. Dick Van Dyke danced his way into our hearts with iconic roles in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Dick Van Dyke Show. Now, as he's about to turn 100 years old, Dick is still dancing and approaching life with a twinkle in his eye that we've come to know and love. In 100 Rules for Living to 100, he reveals his secrets for maintaining your joy de verve and making the most of the life you've been given. So make sure to check out 100 Rules for Living to 100 An Optimist Guide to a Happy Life by Dick Van Dyke, read by Tom Bergeron and Dick Van Dyke. And thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode.
- [14:52]
B
This episode is brought to you by Disney. This Thanksgiving, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are back on the big screen. So grab your family and friends as Disney invites you to return to Zootopia for the fur nominal movie event of the holiday season. See all your favorite Zootopia characters plus new favorites in the most paw eomet movie of the year. Don't miss Disney Zootopia 2 when it hits theaters everywhere November 26th. Get your tickets now.
- [15:21]
D
So yes, this is where we get to magical realism. As Jeff mentioned, this has essentially the very broad definition there is that it is something where I guess the better summary is the supernatural as mundane is a kind of phrase that you'll see over and over again. But yeah, it is a central literary movement and literary style. The origins of this even people like to I saw a lot of this on the Internet. Like, well, actually real magical realism became, you know, in like the 1920s with like some German dude. And that is true. Like the actual term magical realism was credited to a German photographer and I think art historian and art critic named Franz Rowe. And he was using it to describe modern realist paintings that had like fantasy or dreamlike subjects. But literarily, like we're talking about books, this literary movement very much belongs to this Latin American boom of the 1960s. So this is where, again, we get a book that blends magical elements in with reality, which is distinguished from the magic that you might see in, say, fantasy or speculative fic, because those elements are not perceived as magical in what we call magical realism. So it is tonally normal that you would see a dead grandma at the table sitting down to dinner, a priest spontaneously levitating, a wave of yellow flowers that just rained downs from the sky following the death of a patriarch. My special favorite. The special feelings that you feel for your crush seep into the quail dish that you've whipped up. And now all the people that eat that meal at a table are horny as hell.
- [16:47]
B
Oh, you hate that. You hate to hear it.
- [16:49]
C
Yeah.
- [16:50]
D
Your sister is so overcome by the horniness, she has to run away and, like, take a shower and, like, it's a whole thing.
- [16:55]
A
So, anyway, magical realism, the Quails of Hornitude.
- [17:00]
D
I'm gonna have to refer to that book that way from now on, which I will talk about later. So the sort of. I wrote this down. Daddy of magical realism. Anyway, the person that people associate the most with magical realism, even if he isn't the first to do it, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He wrote over 20 books in his lifetime. I think 24. The two that come up the most, I would say, are 100 years of solitude and Love in the Time of cholera. This masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published in 1967, and it uses the fictional setting of Macondo as this allegory for Latin America as a whole, to explore a lot of the themes that I brought up earlier. Right. Themes of identity politics of people, but also family dynamics as they pertain to, really, the entire region. As Rebecca said, it's this whole movement is being inspired and thinking about these questions and trying to wrestle with them. So some of the notable examples, like Water for Chocolate, is the one I was just teasing with the Quails of Hornet Tooth there.
- [17:58]
C
Her.
- [17:59]
A
So glad that that's with us now.
- [18:01]
D
It's great. That one is essentially about a woman who, as the youngest daughter in a family, this all takes place during the Mexican Revolution. Her lot in life is that she has to care for her mother. Her mother is a very, like, just tyrannical figure. She's like, nope, that this is what you're going to do for the rest of your life. Of course she falls in love, wants to get married, and her mom's like, no, you may not, but if you want, your sister can marry him. So he'll at least be, like, close in the family. And everyone's like, yeah, this is a great idea. Spoiler. It's terrible idea. So you get all of this. The magical realism element there is that, you know, when she cooks, the things that she feels seep into her food. Everything from overwhelming grief to the horny feelings. And so that's its own thing.
- [18:38]
A
And like, white people definitely like to borrow this because the particular sadness of Lemon Cake, the Amy bender novel about 10 or 12 years ago, that's the idea that you're cooking the feelings into certain food and that it transmits.
- [18:51]
D
This is one that I started to see a lot in the last several years in like, just cozy kind of romantasy and. Or just romance, honestly, is like this idea that somebody's got, like, a magical ability and, like, the stuff comes into the food. So whenever I see it, I like to be that annoying person that's like, actually, this comes from. So it's just me.
- [19:08]
A
It shows up in Rushdie, too.
- [19:10]
D
He is another one of the authors that often gets thrown into the like, does this qualify as magical realism? Him and Toni Morrison. And I'd say Ishiguro are probably the three that I constantly see mixes of, like, non Latin American. Yeah, it made me think for a second. But we have lots of other authors that you probably recognize from this period. Isabel Allende is who another who is and were with the House of the Spirits. But really so many of the books that she's written tap into this. Yes, there is a supernatural element. One of the main characters is clairvoyant and we're like, reading her. Or her husband is reading her journals and reconstructing her life. But it's also a huge commentary on the politics of Chile and the dictatorship that happened in the 70s. So you get this really. And to be honest, this is one of the reasons why a lot of this literature didn't appeal to me when I was a really young reader, because I wasn't ready for the politics of it all. It took me until becoming more of an adult to recognize what they were wrestling with and the juxtaposition of all of these. What I felt like, yeah, were supernatural elements to discuss these very real and, like, heavy subjects. Or they were definitely like a portal in a way that they weren't.
- [20:11]
A
When I was young, I tried to read Love in the Time of Cholera after picking it up off like a Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table. I think my freshman year in college and I had no idea what I was doing.
- [20:24]
D
I tried to pick that up because the movie came out, right. And it was. Everybody was like. Or like, yeah, I think it was a movie that was about that era. Was it? It was. Something happened around that time that everybody. Maybe it was just that people were reading it in my life, but I remember buying it. And then I had relatives and like a teacher in my class that would ask me about it and I. I hid it at a cousin's house. I wonder if she ever found it. And just like. Like deep underneath, like the bunk bed and was like, oh, I don't know where my copy is. Like, I could have just said I didn't want to read it. But no, I. I couldn't confess to the DNF at those times. So. Anywho. So that's that. So there's tons of examples of other authors. Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro is one that I'm going to talk about a little bit because her work has become newly relevant with a couple of new releases. I think you should check out Maria Luisa Bombal, Jose Marti, Jorge Luis Borges. These are names that might sound familiar. Juan Rufo is another really interesting one because he wrote Pedro Paramo before the Latin American boom. This actually was closer, I think, in the 1950s. But there's a really beautiful foreword that Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes in a newer edition of Pedro Paramo where he talks about living in Mexico City. He'd written five sort of under the radar novels and he just couldn't figure out. He's like, I knew I had another story in me, multiple stories, but couldn't figure a way out. Or like he said, he was like stuck in a blind alley and that a friend of his came running up seven flights of stairs and put Pedro Paramo in his lap and was like, read this and learn. And Fabrilo Garrison Marquez describes staying up all night to read it twice. And that he hadn't felt that kind of reaction to a book since Kafka. And it helped open up whatever mental portals needed to be open for him to go on and write 100 Years of Solitude. So deep tradition even in the books that we maybe weren't classifying as part of the magical realism movement. That thematic use of the supernatural as mundane is a thing that definitely wove its way in to explore those big questions about identity in the wake of colonization.
- [22:12]
A
Yeah, that supernatural as mundane key. It feels very helpful now for unlocking this.
- [22:19]
D
I go back to it a lot and it is really like, I remember when I finally read House of the Spirits, it's like that Book can be real heavy. They're talking about the patriarchy, machismo, the issues of class specifically with the like more indigenous folks and like colorism. And then also the part that really brought me to the book though was that I knew that there was this clairvoyant and like maybe a dead sister that was in the mix. And I don't know that I would have come to it if it hadn't been for that supernatural. But I was ready for it to be a big deal. And then yeah, you open up the book and realize everyone's just like, oh yeah, that's. That's her. Like, that's. She's just there like, oh, okay. And because it was. The mundanity was really different for me from somebody who read a lot of fantasy and like more overtly things done correctly.
- [22:57]
B
It has its own feel. And I think that's one thing I'd encourage people to be on the lookout for is like you can kind of feel the difference between magical realism and surrealism or fabulism or something like that because the. The as close as they can stay to the real and yet give you a sense of the uncanny or the strange. It's kind of magic. I mean it is magical as a reading, but as a tonal experience too, it's quite difficult. Like one of the things that Marquez does so adroitly is moves in between the fantastical and the familiar and you don't even really know it's switching. Like I think about Jose Saramago's the Blindness of the Stone Raft where you, You. You get into it and then you almost forget that there's a supernatural element because it's, it's. It's so present and ambient. But as I think Vanessa is. Has other. Has either already sort of captured, but maybe going too forward lets itself be a conduit to thinking and talking about things that are sort of unthinkable, unexpressible. Just using the tools of reality. Right. That's the other thing that. To look out for people's going, well, why can't this be magical? Realizing, well, there's blurriness and whatever, but the social, political and cultural critique or point of view being brought forward by, okay, why is that? What is this thing doing other than just being kind of cool and creepy? Because that's when you sort of bleed away from it. Then you're just, isn't that scary? Isn't that cool? Isn't that, you know, aren't those things amazing and they become red for their own purposes and that's an easy way I think to sort of feel a line in your own reading is like am I reading this because there's a supernatural element? Or I'm reading this because of something else, but there's a supernatural element that comes in sort of through the side door to reinforce it or you know, give a different lens on it.
- [24:39]
D
Yeah, absolutely. We have a couple posts on this, on the site that talk about it, but specifically wanted to take a second which was just be perfectly teed up is like yeah to talk about some of the. And again these are going to get blurry. But the definitions that we ascribe to the differences between magical realism and something like fabulism or surrealism, typically surrealism you'll see defined as works that sort of, yes, upend the accepted realities, but they're much more internal. They're like the. The realities of the mind, the inner self. It doesn't so much look outward. Like magical realism is very concerned, as Jeff said, with looking outward. Yes, there's some maybe internal considerations, but it's very socio political. It is critiquing structures and move etc. Whereas surrealism is again much more about inner workings. Fabulism, this one gets all kinds of blurry but a generally agreed upon is that it also places fables and myth specifically in a contemporary setting.
- [25:32]
B
I don't think I thought about the fables and myths neither had I.
- [25:35]
D
Or at least not as much.
- [25:36]
A
Right.
- [25:36]
D
And like that on its face feels like it meets the same rubric.
- [25:40]
C
Right.
- [25:40]
D
Like okay, so it's like something supernatural but like in the contemporary. So eh, but those fantastical elements, yes are entwined with the everyday, but are not necessarily as grounded in, like you said, just realism. Like there will still be an acknowledgment of the like eh, that's not like.
- [25:55]
B
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov sometimes gets confused for magical realism, but the people in that are really freaked out. And it's a much more direct allegory for like God and Satan and stuff. Like there's not a lot of ambiguity about what the hell is going on or what the purpose of the. You know, what, you know, it's kind of easy to. Or it's more straightforward, not easy.
- [26:15]
A
So as we're evaluating a work and we're trying to figure out is this magical realism, is it surrealism? Whatever. I remember a moment on the literary Internet where the instruction seemed to be if it's not by a Latine writer, it can't be magical realism. And that everything that was magical realism Adjacent, but by say, somebody like Salman Rushdie or a white writer, whoever got shuttled into with. Just use one of the other terms. Just call it surrealist.
- [26:45]
D
Yep.
- [26:46]
A
But that seems to me to not be accurate to the form of art or like the spirit of the definition. So I'm hearing that we're updating our priors on how we talk about these things.
- [26:59]
D
And to be super transparent, when I first started writing for Book Riot, possibly even before, I remember having a reaction, and this was as a baby meeting, this was however many like a decade ago at this point. And I'm not an expert per se, but did have a reaction because we have a must reads post on the site that is. I can't remember if it's 50 or 100 titles, but it's one of them, right. That is like magical realism. And it lists every single one of the titles that we have mentioned today as not being an example of magical realism. And then some, because it is this very broad definition of what it is. And go. And I remember having it like, okay, well, that is not how I would necessarily define it because to me it is very much something that is a part of this Latin American, okay, boom. But I. So then there's the definition that expands it more to like, no, this is actually something that other like diasporic cultures and. Or just like folks of color can write under. And that definition is fraught for me because not all Latin American folks are people of color. In fact, many of them are not. So who gets to gatekeep this? I'm not, you know, I can't be the one to police it, per se.
- [28:00]
B
I think the messiness is useful. I mean, I think exactly what I was. I think that's really helpful to have a sense of the terrain, even if the map isn't super clear and none of the cultural stuff is super clear. But like, I think it's important, it's useful and important to have a sense of the history. Like. Like maybe you have a more expansive definition for yourself about what magical realism. But you also should acknowledge the same point that there was a locus of origin. Right. And there was a reason and a history behind those terms. And then you can have an interesting conversation about edge cases and border cases, which was. I like to dwell.
- [28:31]
D
Right.
- [28:31]
B
I like to have those conversations.
- [28:32]
D
I love that.
- [28:33]
B
That's very fun and generative. But I think it. You can, you can have those conversations in good faith if and only if you also say, and there's this history here that we should know.
- [28:46]
A
I'm sure, Vanessa, when you come on to zero to. Well, read. And we talk about this a little bit more, we'll talk about some of the other writers that have been influenced by it, like, since I referenced Rushdie earlier, like, maybe Midnight's Children is an interesting example there because he's writing into. It's a different culture, but into a moment of political revolution and upheaval, clearly inspired by Garcia Marquez. But you do get, like, it looks like a guy is hovering, just like, you know, is he actually levitating or not? Is a different question. People cook their feelings into food. You know, all sorts of wild things can happen in a Rushdie novel. And it actually kind of seems to me in a lot of ways beside the point to try to litigate, like, is this to the letter of magical realism or not? But the broader project for us as readers is to understand what we actually are talking about when we talk about, like, the origins of. Of the movement.
- [29:40]
D
That's absolutely it. Just like all the conversations that we have about whether or not a book is. Especially if it's a book from a different time, you know, is it problematic? Is it this? Is it that it's like, as long as you're having contextual conversations about these things that place them in their time and that you are thinking about and giving credit to the things that need to be credited. That is, the thing is much more interesting to me than to just sit here and give, like, a pass or fail to whether or not a book is magical realism. I do get a teeny bit miffed when it is a completely white author that calls a book that, to me, is very much more seated in the fantasy or what have you that just like. But it's magical realism. It's like, I don't know that you've done the homework here, and that part can get a little funny to me. But overall, that's. Again, I don't correct people. And I am willing to concede that potentially the works of Toni Morrison, that Salman Rushdie are. Could be classified in that way as long as they're meeting some of those markers that, again, acknowledge the history of where it comes from, that are doing that sociopolitical stuff. But even again, no one's gonna be, like Vanessa said. So there's that.
- [30:30]
B
Well, I think it's interesting to see on either side of a, you know, a differential for a particular work. Why is it important for someone to include it and why it might be important for someone to exclude it. And that's almost more interesting to me than the Book. I mean, trying to apply the label. I think one thing I've learned as a reader is the analytical and historical tools I want to know. But they're only a means to an end, which is me to have a rich experience of the text itself. And so if it unlocks something for you, great, and if it doesn't, don't. But I think. I think. I think I have a similar sense of someone who wants to glom on a reading, a review, a writing experience onto a familiar term just to steal or just to use some of the glory or the shine as opposed to it. That's whether or not the book actually meets the definition or not. It's the. I want to be a part of that because being a part of that gets something for me, that's pretty dicey territory. And you can tell who's having a good faith argument. Right. I think you can absolutely tell most of the time who's interested in, like. Like, let's think about this together.
- [31:37]
A
And who's just, like, riding the coattails.
- [31:39]
D
Yeah.
- [31:40]
B
Or. Or trying to gatekeep in a really specific way. Because Morrison is a great example. It's like, okay, so if it's not magical realism by a more strict definition, what is it then? How does it participate? How does it comment on? How is it different? How is that enriching both to the original sort of movement and this other manifestation thereof? Because structurally, it's very hard to say. They're totally different things. That doesn't seem useful either.
- [32:04]
D
No, it doesn't. Yeah. Wholeheartedly agree. And it's a term that magical realism in particular, just from how much time I spend combing through book catalogs, isn't a thing that I felt like I saw very often. Until I'd say, the last, like, three or four years, it started getting applied to a lot more books. And that felt very much like a relation to the fact that people were showing more interest in Latin American stories than they had in a bit. And in genre, speculative genre.
- [32:27]
B
I think that's right.
- [32:28]
A
That genres crossing over into literary fiction and people who are historically just literary readers don't really know what to do with it. But magical realism is a familiar term, and it has some cache around it, like, oh, this book has weird stuff in it. Let's just, like, grab for this label that people will recognize and call it magical realism. But definitely not, like, definitely not everything that gets called it is magical realism. And we also want to avoid a situation where, like, we're analyzing the copy of every book with a Checklist for does this qualify or not? That also seems to be missing the point.
- [33:03]
D
That does.
- [33:04]
B
I've got a question for you, Vanessa, that I thought about the idea of magic realism and its blurriness. I've got. I think they're related points. Maybe it's just one point. Let's see, let's see what comes out. This should be interesting. I wonder if some of the temptation to label one's own work or the work of others that sort of broadly fits is just because it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a term that kind of implicitly makes sense. Yeah, right. Like it's not like vorticism, right. Which is a literary movement from like Italy in the 20s.
- [33:37]
D
Like you don't heard before.
- [33:39]
B
Like, and we could go through that at some point. But like if you use that term and say, well, this is a vortices work, no one can port that sort of ready made onto some other work. The idea of magical realism, the name is so evocative, but maybe too generally so that it's so easy. Like, well, it's magic and it's real. So it feels like those are the things that chain the terms when really there's like a whole series of nested Wikipedia articles that one could do to sort of see why those things emerge and why we don't have some other term for, you know, my. My grandfather left me a unicorn. I was thinking about Bertino. Rebecca Bertino traffics in these small moments of clearly weird supernatural elements that are treated as totally unremarkable. Totally unremarkable. And it's cultural and internal. Psychologically interesting. But to call it political in the same way Marquez or Borges or Morrison is just a completely different artistic project. So I think that's. It's a cool name. And that cool name is traveled.
- [34:41]
D
And it's a cool name that if you like just, I think, pull. Anybody off the street who isn't bookish could probably arrive at a working day definition. Right?
- [34:49]
B
What does magical realism mean? Fill in the blank.
- [34:51]
D
Realism with some magic. Like, yeah, bro, pretty much like.
- [34:55]
A
Like somewhere there's like an annoying dark side of this where somebody is going, like, is it magical realism or is it realism?
- [35:00]
B
Magical y. Oh, yeah, realist.
- [35:03]
D
If you summon those people in the comments, you have only yourself to blame is what I'm saying. But wait, realist magic?
- [35:08]
B
Babel, would that be like Babel, realist magic?
- [35:11]
D
Maybe, maybe. Oh my gosh, that book. That is a. Yeah, I'm like, ooh, that just thought back to that reading experience for a second with Venmo Stash.
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B
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- [36:17]
D
Try now@windows.com copilot so these discussions about the wishy washy or just blurriness of magical realism are a good segue into another aspect of it, which is that a lot of folks are now rejecting the term outright and find there's some backlash to the use. For a couple reasons, this kind of gets a little bit to the question Rebecca asked earlier. For one, there are plenty of folks who are like, hey, just because it's written by a Latin American author, especially if it came out or the 60s, doesn't mean you get it's just magical realism. Like that is very much not true, right? There's a really interesting piece that I remember having a reaction to at the time that I'm beginning to understand now by Silvia Moreno Garcia, who I am famously like a fan girl of and she's like an auto read person for me. But she wrote a piece for the New York Times called Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism wherein she talks about how this style that was once loosely connected to, you know, Latin American authors who penned works this time ago that and of course is now happening in the English speaking world too, but that it's becoming synonymous with Latin American writing in general and that she is the example she gives is what is something about Austen like picture if every work by a British writer would be called Austinesque like that is how she feels about Latin American folks's work often getting painted as magical realism. And this is something that came up for her a lot when she put out Mexican gothic. And there were a lot of pieces about this that like, getting to classify that book into a genre was like pulling teeth because everybody wanted to call it magical realism. She was like, hey, I've talked to other authors, like Mariana Enriquez was one that she brought up having a conversation with where like we just, we want to be spec fic and like horror writers. And yes, not to say that we weren't influenced by these other traditions, but like my book is not magical realism. It is straight up like fantasy horror or it is gothic horror or it is, you know, what have you. And that was interesting to me because I'm sure I have referred to some of her works at one point as having like a magical realism realist element, even though I don't know that that was accurate. But having this whole kind of backlash to it at once at one point felt like an overreaction to me. But seeing as how in general, and we do have a piece about this on Book Riot, that's like, when is something called horror and when is it called like a thriller? And it's like, oh, it's when the woman wrote it, you know, that I understand why folks from our community are fighting to just get like the genre representation, specifically in these male dominated fields to say, like, hey, it doesn't have to be Latin American magical realism just because I'm Latin or Latin American, like, let me just be the weirdo writing gothic horror.
- [38:40]
C
Yeah.
- [38:40]
A
And this happens like as. And you alluded to some of the other examples with genre or even just with like category, content, subject matter of books that depending on the race, the class, the gender of the person who wrote them, the same subject matter can be interpreted differently. So John Updike wants to write about messy marriages and he's winning Pulitzers. Other people want to write about messy marriages and it's women's fiction. You know that like we've had that conversation. The thing that you're saying about like, not every book, book by a Latin author is magic realism. A Latin author writing a horror book is a horror book. And it seems that we're existing on a spectrum of what is magic realism. It can be magic realism and horror. But when the author is telling you, I'm not working in this tradition, I'm not working in this political movement tradition of magical realism, I just wanted to write a horror book that seems important to me as well. This is complex.
- [39:37]
D
And that's the beauty of getting to have that discussion, I think, because there are, like, if I. If somebody had told me, can you argue a case that Mexican Gothic, for example, could be Latin, or, pardon me, magical realism, I could potentially make the argument like, it is a book. And yes, the stuff that she experiences is in the surreal. It's, you know, the. The house is doing all kinds of things, et cetera. And she's not necessarily counting them as odd. It is very much a discussion sociopolitically of what it was like for, like, British people to be in this part of Mex, and how, like, the effects of colonization were being felt in these, like, weird ways, et cetera. But, like, if the author herself is like, no, this is not the tradition that I'm writing in, like Rebecca just said, like, that feels important to me to pay attention to. And again, it's less interesting to me to sit here and actually litigate the like, yes or no of it than.
- [40:20]
B
To just be like, okay, I find it interesting, but not like, I don't care about the verdict, but I like the deliberation, the jury deliberation.
- [40:28]
A
Well, and it also elides how much of this is about sales and publicity and publishing trying to label books in ways that they believe readers will understand and find compelling enough to buy and read and talk about the book. And magical realism is so singular as one. Like, it is this very singular thing that you tend to, like, have a feeling associated with that. I understand why publishing would try to glom onto it, but it has been used in so many ways that aren't accurate, that, like, this is one of those cases where if you say it's magic realism on the tin and then you read the book and it does not have magic realism elements, readers haven't gotten the thing that they've wanted. So there's also some, like, caution publishing on what we're calling magic realism as well. But that happens too. It's not just on the ground readers maybe misinterpreting the genre of something because they think that anything by a Latin a writer is magic realism. But publishing has these categories that are specifically for selling books. And that's hard to get around that, like, commoditization of something that's so connected to identity.
- [41:41]
D
Yes. That say the. So, like, I forever, I think, focus on that aspect of the publishing machine. Right. It's like the glomming on for the purposes of selling books. Cila Bueno Garcia and the article also talks about the opposite side, which is that it's also a bit of a, like a shortcut to just go, this is magical realism. And so it fits in this particular category. And this is not like a thing we're interested in publishing and also maybe not translating. And if you do look at the Latin American boom of books that did get translated into English for the longest time, it was specifically like Mexican and I think Argentinian stories that got more of the shine like others. So, like, if you know, again, it's an interesting conversation to have. I'm just not as interested in like every book having to have this pass fail. I'm just gonna take an author at their word, if that's what they say, and just enjoy it for what it is. And the ones that do get the label, the think I've earned it, like, great, let's just know the context in which this exists and keep it pushing and, you know, read some really cool books.
- [42:30]
B
What do you guys think of that idea that an author can say, I am writing X, not Y, Because I've come to the conclusion over time that I want to take, take the author's word as a part of the discussion. But ultimately the text is the text, right? The text is the text. And I don't know that you get to have control over where you are. I mean, over time, if the critical and sort of scholarly apparatus does its work, your work will be contextualized and related to and other things that are going on. But I think in a moment an author doesn't know or can't really know where they sit amongst the works coming out at the moment, even the immediate past. But then the future, right? Because then if your book is influenced, someone that comes after you and then a line starts being drawn through them, how much is that your control? Like, the most control you have is what words you put on the page. And people can be used and abused. But ultimately, once the text is out in the world again, good faith arguments that people are willing to engage in kind of a full throated, interested, open and curious discussion. That's maybe naive, a lot of caveats. But having said that, like, some people didn't think they were part of the Harlem Renaissance or part of, you know, the Reconstruction or the Enlightenment. They didn't even know what the Enlightenment was until 100. So it's so hard to know to, to. I can understand the desire to want to have control over the narrative of what your work is and what you do, but it seems to me ultimately a futile one. And that's Left for others to wrestle with over time.
- [44:08]
D
Yeah. This idea that, you know, I think about this. This is tangential, but not. But in the way that we talk about how reviews are places for readers and not for authors. Right. It's like once you put your book out into the world, all the intentions that you had are your intentions and they matter. But also, once that book is out in the world, it does what it do and the readers are going to take it one way or another. I specifically the. You know, she comes back a lot in this piece to what she considers a kind of the erasure of horror, specifically women in horror. I think all the time about Kelly Jensen, one of our senior editor who will die on the hill of horror is not a genre. It's a feeling. She has been saying this to me since I, like, first knew what Book Riot was. She's written pieces about it that she's like. And I understand. Like, you know, she's. She's studied this. Like, horror really is so many things, right? Like, horror is not this one definition of someone has to get, you know, chainsawed.
- [44:56]
B
Or.
- [44:56]
D
I don't know why I picked that specific example. But. But anyway, horror just being this giant spectrum of things that can happen and feel and be was interesting to me. When she's sitting here going, well, no, don't, you know, the erasure or horror is important. And yes, but I also would agree and argue that a lot of the topics and. Or books in general, the whole book that fall under the magical realism category, I would also very much consider horror by that definition. And like, again, that gets sticky, which is why, like, we keep saying it's important and interesting to have the chat. But I'm also just like, okay, well, I just want to read the book now. Like, let's just do that.
- [45:28]
A
And, well, and like, how we talk about this evolves because when we started book riot 15 years ago, almost speculative fiction was not used widely as a category that readers talked about. We talked about science fiction, we talked about fantasy, we talked about dystopian novels. Jeff and I once had like, a.
- [45:46]
B
Really real long argument.
- [45:51]
A
About speculative fiction versus science fiction. And now speculative fiction is just in the water. It's in the ways that publishing talks about the books that it produces. It's in the ways that authors talk about their books and that readers identify as people who are interested in speculative kinds of things. But that's also like, you could make the case that, like, speculative is not a genre. Speculative is like a function that a work does. You can Be speculative horror, you could be speculative fantasy. You could be all kinds of speculative stuff. And I also think that as like to your point, Jeff, that's one of those things that writers can have a sense of what they're trying to do with it in the moment. But what that speculation looks like 10 or 20 or 40 or 50 years down the line, if it inspires other works or how it fits in the pantheon of other things that speculated is a really interesting question. Like, did Octavia Butler think of herself as writing speculative fiction when she wrote the Parable of the Soda most early?
- [46:48]
B
No, she was. She was Sci Fi, Ride or die.
- [46:51]
D
Right.
- [46:51]
B
That was explicitly part of her project. And the other thing that I always think about too is the mental proclivity to want to categorize is powerful. And I understand why, because the world is wide and we are but small, and these definitions can help us organize and relate and give some kind of structure. But I like the mess. Right. The more directly you deal with the specificity of the text, the more accurate going to be. And so I can certainly understand an author saying, you using this term is a really convenient way to feel like you understand what I'm doing without having to do the work of engaging with.
- [47:30]
D
The test, which is valid.
- [47:31]
B
What I want to do is be able to engage with the test and then be left to my own devices to say, I don't care what you said, author, about what you did. What I'm seeing is X, Y and Z and here's where and here's why. But most of the people that want to brush with so broad a stroke, they're not interested. That's not what they're trying to do. They want a category. It's like, is it good? Is it bad?
- [47:49]
D
Am I going to like this?
- [47:51]
B
Am I going to like this? Which category in Goodreads am I going to put it under what are my comp titles? And those are all necessary, those are all useful things to do. But in aggregate, they start to have really diminishing effects when it comes to actually trying to. To, you know, engage with an author, engage with work on its own terms, whatever it might be.
- [48:09]
D
Yeah.
- [48:10]
A
And I wonder now that you're saying that both of you, if for readers, magical realism is shorthand for a feeling rather than shorthand for something, I can see that being it on the page. Like, I just wonder if that's part of how it's. How the way it's been applied has become so broad that, like, you feel a certain way when the dead grandma shows up to do and nobody blinks because, like, this is fine in the world that they live in, there's a certain, like, unsettledness about it or, like, you know, like a Scooby Doo. What's happening here? And then as a reader, in. At least in my experience, when I read something like that and a weird thing is happening, and then I figure out, oh, this is part of the world that these characters live in. This is part, like, this part of what the author is doing. Something unlocks there. And I like that unsettled feeling. So for me, when someone says to me, like, this, this has magical realism elements, I think I'm expecting that feeling, like. Cause so many different things can happen. It's not like, as you're saying, it's not always dead grandma showing up to dinner in the same way that horror is not always like a chainsaw massacre. But there's something about what it feels like to read it. And that's maybe not what the author is going for, especially if they're writing into, like, this politically defined version of magical realism. But that's certainly. That's how I hear it when someone recommends me something and says, and it has these magical realism elements, I'm like, oh, that's how I'm gonna feel when I read it. I'm gonna be in this zone where something is unsettling and strange, but then it makes sense inside the world. And boy, like, I like that. So sign me up.
- [49:44]
B
And I take that one step further, and I'm curious what Vanessa thinks of this. It's that plus that. That feeling or that intervention of the strangeness. Change is then about something else itself, right? Whether it's about how relationships are weird when you have a haunted peach or your dead daughter shows up because you killed her to avoid slaves, about how oppressive the chattel slavery actually was. Like, it doesn't just feel one way, but that feeling is directed towards a larger idea or condition of some kind. And I think that's why it can be so blurry, is. It's so useful. The term, as we've talked about, is like, well, some. Something that there's magic in the real world that's pretty easy to slap on so many things. The next part is harder. The next part is. Okay, so why. What is this about? What is this and what is the ends to which this is a means to. Is a more difficult and frankly, a readerly intervention that people don't do when they're just trying to decide how many stars to give something on goodreads I.
- [50:41]
D
Think that's where I would absolutely land. Like, for me, this discussion has been everything I wanted to be. I was like, will it go full 40 minutes? Yes. Yes, it did. Three of us. But. But is because, yeah, you could easily slap this label on a. I read a romance last year that, like, a woman who bakes, you know, and she does it very specifically. Like, she knows that the stuff that she feels goes into her bakes. And so she does this very specifically to, like, give to people who have a specific need. And it was lovely, but it didn't give me that feeling of like, okay, what did that device serve? Like, what. What else was it trying to comment on? What else was it going to make me think about, way wrestle with in the way that the books I think of as magical realism do? So that's where I tend to land for myself. I'm definitely not going to stop you in the street and, like, slap a book out of your hand because you called it magical Magical realism. Like, but, you know, it's.
- [51:25]
B
And it has entered into the author's toolbox a con. A convenient. A pretty easy tool to reach for that lends interest to your book. Because if you're like, okay, I can. The hammer is magic in this word, working shop. And it's. Or it's haunted or something, like, suddenly you have interest. And I think there's a. I don't want to say a cheat code, but it can be a shortcut to imbuing your work with something other than you had on yourself. It's kind of like I've said before about TV shows, like the ones with a gun are easier to make more attention than the ones without a gun.
- [51:55]
D
Yeah.
- [51:55]
B
The temptation, when you can bring the speculative into every day is then it's just about that. It doesn't have to be about something else. What the magical realist tradition that we're kind of spinning out from here is it's actually a way to talk about something that they couldn't figure out a different way to talk about. Or, like, give them new tools to say new things. When the example you think of. I'm thinking of. And I think. I think a couple examples I don't want to name where it enlivens what might be a moribund story. Just enough to hold your attention for 300 pages, but that's about it.
- [52:28]
D
Yeah. And I actually have found that when people ask me for recommendations, or at least they have in the past when I was still a bookseller, that a lot of folks who Were resistant to reading genre. Were willing to read Magical Realism because it still felt like, you know, lit fake with smart person reading, little hint of something. And so, again, like, this, that that label can be used to do so many things.
- [52:48]
A
Yeah. Like, you don't have to construct a whole new world in your head. Like, yeah.
- [52:53]
D
Which again, has pluses, minuses. Oh. Anyway, this was a great chat. I did want to kind of wrap by doing so you don't have to look too hard for classics. I mentioned a bunch of them, but I am going to quick fire just some of the ones that, like, have always stuck with me. So of course we have 100 years of solitude by Marquez. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende with Jorge Luis Borges. You could do either Labyrinths or Fictiones. Fictions. Those are both great in, like, a little smaller stories. Or Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar.
- [53:24]
B
I love hopscotch. That is a trip of a book.
- [53:27]
D
It is super. I almost did and was like, no, you got a rapid fire that the guys were like, coming up.
- [53:32]
B
It's not long, but don't let it deceive you. Don't look at the page count and think, this is going to be easy.
- [53:36]
D
Ready reading. Nope. I want to say I may have read that at one point because I only had, like, so much left in the year. Was trying to blast. And then I just did that thing where I was existentially looking out, like, out to the wilderness for a bit. Like, what? What have I done? Yeah, but great.
- [53:49]
A
That's a whole other podcast. The books that you definitely should not try to read in a hurry.
- [53:53]
D
Oh, yeah, I would put that smack on that list. Some more recent books that I have loved that I do think fall under this. The Storyteller's Death by Anne Davila Cardinal is a really cool, like, family saga about this Puerto Rican woman who realizes she's inherited this ability that other women in her family do to see visions of her deceased ancestors. She develops this after her grandmother dies. And it sounds cool, except that she's now, like, on repeat seeing the murder of a family member that people don't know about and having to, like, decide what to do with that information. It's really great. The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez, who is like, right. Like, has a whole catalog that's just.
- [54:30]
B
A couple years old that's.
- [54:33]
D
And I was so happy that she put out something new that I was like, she's still got it because this one is very Much about an author who realizes she doesn't want to end up like a friend of hers who has worked so long and hard to finish her book that she didn't live life. So she's like, I'm gonna go buy a plot of land in Dominican Republic, and that's what I'm gonna do. But she literally decides to actually bury it, physically bury her unfinished manuscripts. And it's like, oh, so my characters can rest in peace. And then those characters are like, oh, we have something to say. And they include everything from, like, a dictator's wife.
- [55:02]
B
Modern starting point. Because it's also not. It's a very. I don't want to say easy, but it's.
- [55:09]
D
No, but it's.
- [55:09]
B
It reads.
- [55:10]
A
Yes, it reads more accessible.
- [55:12]
B
Yeah.
- [55:12]
D
Some of the ones I'm picking, I feel like, have that quality in the way of, like, if you want to dip your toes into, like, what I'm talking about and get ready for the hopscotch, maybe start with some of these. A book that is. Well, it is very relatable into it, but it's called Magical Realism by. Sorry, Vanessa. I should know her first name. It's my name. Vanessa Angelica Real is a book that I thought was going to be, like, a really academic dissection of magical realism. And it's not. It's a book that she wrote when she was called to, like, Mexico to reconnect with some of her ancestry. And then when she got back, her life fell apart and she decided to write this story that takes a look at the ways in which magical realism are a part of everything from, like, the TV and video games and movies, and also, of course, the books that we read. But she has this. The question that she asked throughout the book is, what does the constant state of loss after colonization, enslavement, and dispossession do to the collective imagination? Which, to me is the big question of that Latin American magical realism was trying to answer. It's really good, while also being fun. I mean, you talk about the Witcher video game and Selina all in one book.
- [56:15]
C
Amazing.
- [56:17]
D
And then the last one I wanted to leave with is actually a twofer. So there is. Admittedly, I. I have not read Elena Garro, but she is considered, like, the. I've seen her called, like, the Dark Witch or, like, the something witch of magical realism. So I was like, okay, I need to make sure that I read her. But her books had never been translated, or at least the one that made her famous, the Week of Colors, had never been translated into English. Not only has it been translated into English, and it's out now, and it's a collection of stories that are like feminist horror, magical realism, and apparently quite creepy and just interesting. A book by Jasmina Barrera just came out out also not in conjunction, but just happened to come out at the same time about a woman who wanted to write an essay about Elena Garro. And then the more she tried to research her through kind of just conventional research methods was like, this is getting me nowhere. There's too much about this person to know.
- [57:02]
B
Time for a summoning.
- [57:04]
D
I mean, like. And so it's, it's. I'm. I'm. I just got. Or I'm about to get my hands on a copy of that one. But reading those two in conjunction felt like a cool project to, like, take on for. For myself.
- [57:14]
A
We'll have Vanessa put these titles into the show notes so folks can refer back to those as well. Vanessa, I learned some things today, and now I am less scared to use the term magical realism outside. Like, I, I feel a little bit less nervous about where to apply it.
- [57:29]
D
And I promise not to smack books out of your hands.
- [57:31]
A
So if anyone's allowed to, it's you, Vanessa.
- [57:35]
B
Thanks. You're going to be joining us on Zero to well read in the new year, which we. We may or may not be talking about one of the books Men mentioned here, which I'm looking forward to, and I haven't read it in a long time. Don't ask me my quick summary of that book because I don't think I'd have anything. Rebecca, can I tell you about hopscotch just on the end here, because I had to remind myself because I don't want to mess it up. So it has a table of instructions in which you're asked to read the book in two ways. One is progressively through the chapters and the other one according to a hopscotch table table where you go through in a different set, but chapter one of the chapters is left out. So then you return to the original and you recur. Read on in a recursive loop that goes back and forth forever. It is a trip of a.
- [58:19]
A
That's cool.
- [58:20]
B
Yeah, it's very cool. And I was wrong. I think I'm missing this up, Vanessa, because I thought it was short. It is not short. So I don't know what book I'm thinking of, but 576 pages.
- [58:30]
D
No, I absolutely went with you. I wonder if it's because you're reading it in that loop that I was like, oh, this is all just a short thing that I'm reading over in a funky loop. Because I absolutely. I was like, yeah, it's short.
- [58:39]
B
It's a very cool book. It's kind of a sleight of hand that turns into something more at the same time. Anyway, I just couldn't let you go because it's one of the more interesting Vanessa Joy and a pleasure as always. You can find the show notes bookriot.com Listen, you can shoot us an email podcastookriot.com Check out the show notes also for the Patreon Go join us over at Zero to well read. I don't really know when this is coming out and related to what, but we have a this is coming out tomorrow. This is coming out tomorrow. So before too long you will get to hear Rebecca and I talk about Midnight's Children in which we talk about some of the uses of the surreal, the fantastical in that I don't think we tried to even adjudicate magical realism in that, and I'm glad we did not.
- [59:23]
A
There are plenty of other things to try to adjudicate. But yes, next Tuesday is the Midnight's Children episode of Zero to well read. It's the end of our Friday first season that has gone way better than either of us could ever have expected.
- [59:36]
B
True. All right, Vanessa, thanks so much.
- [59:38]
D
We'll talk to you. Thank you. Bye.