[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Isn't magical realism just a polite way of saying 'written by an elderly South American'?

not really. i don't know there was ever such thing-- yeah, the people of the "boom" took it from carpentier, but garcia marquez for example claims faulkner, virginia woolf and kafka as his literary ancestors.

the other thing is that many elderly South Americans had nothing to do with magical realism-- Vargas Llosa for example, among the most famous, aspired to be the "Latin American Balzac". i'm not saying he achieved this (i don't like him much), but the stereotype plagues the region. Borges on the other hand wrote outright fantastic fiction-- he was into HG Wells and a number of british cunts whose names i can't recall this very moment.

garcia marquez actually says that he simply told stories the way his grandmother used to tell them so "elderly south american" would be correct in this sense-- however elderly south americans aren't the only ones who converse with dead people-- mexicans too (see juan rulfo), but same with the bible-- i mean, people living 900 years and seeing god in a burning bush is nothing new.