[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Yeah, and yet you go into any literature class and the first two words that leap out whenever a latin american writer is mentioned ... 'magical realism'. A continent reduced to a genre. not cool.

whoa i almost lost track of this. exactly. sure garcia marquez is probably our greatest writer, and sure he was a "magical realist", but the equivalent would be to claim that all british literature is elizabethan drama.

anyway, i was listening to garcia marquez's speech to the swedish academy the other day, and it's briliant, it was mostly a collection of numbers and statistics, and it was more fantastic (the number of deaths, the level of carnage) than any "flying abuelitas" (as some people would say).

there is the other problem that a lot of latin american writers seeking to get famous jumped on the bandwagon & produced horrible imitations of our great monster-- im thinking of people like isabel allende, for example-- terrible.

but yes, we are generally freer with imagination-- one of my problems with most of american fiction is that it gets stuck in this sort of mundane realism where the world is taken for granted-- it's all about the individual psychology in the world, and i find that utterly boring: like hollywood movies. the character goes shopping, then watches tv, then has a fight with his wife, and it's the same all shit over and over. boring.

if garcia marquez achieved something with the way he wrote *some* of his books (not all of them), it's that he provided a mythical dimension to history-- but he deal mostly with history-- endless wars and government abuses and massacres that perhaps could not be told in another way. while a lot of people blame him and point the finger at him for exerting such strong influences, i think they are throwing the baby with the bathwater... out of jealousy mostly.