Magical realism is a writing style that gives voice to a story or characters that otherwise resist tidy narrative or linear timelines. The magical element in a predominantly realistic world lets the reader feel the weight of what happened and invites us to more broadly experience an emotion, a background or story which a strictly realistic narrative can limit. So, I encourage you to leave your skepticism behind and enjoy what a little magic can bring to a story.
Tony Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” focuses on Sethe, a woman who has escaped slavery in Ohio, but is haunted by the ghost of her baby whom she killed to prevent her from being returned to slavery. Morrison gives voice to the mother’s grief and guilt in the form of a ghost. Its supernatural attacks and hauntings run off family members and isolate Sethe and her remaining daughter much the way that grief and guilt do. Could these emotions be told in a different way? Maybe, but magical realism allows these feelings to take physical form which gives them a depth that saying “I feel haunted…” often does not.
Magical realism gives the unspeakable a body. In Xochitl Gonzalez’s “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” that body belongs to a bat who represents the restless spirit of Anita de Monte, a Dominican artist who blazed through the New York art world of the 1980s before her death. In 1998, a graduate student stumbles into Anita’s story while researching her thesis, and the novel unfolds across both timelines: the living woman and the haunting Anita becomes after her death. Gonzalez renders this haunting through a magical realism: a bat that embodies Anita’s spirit, giving voice and presence to a woman history tried to erase.
Shelby Van Pelt’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” this year’s One Read selection, follows Tova, a grieving widow who cleans an aquarium each night, and Cameron, a young man adrift in search of his biological family. The humans are observed by Marcellus, an intelligent octopus who lives in the aquarium. Marcellus is never “humanized” and remains a creature, we do hear his voice as he keenly observes and comments on their drama, ultimately attempting to help Tova and Cameron in their efforts to deal with their grief and confusion.
“When I was thirteen… I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin…” we hear the voice of Richie the ghost who has latched on to JoJo, a 13-year-old boy being raised by his grandparents in rural Mississippi. In “Sing, Unburied, Sing” Jesmyn Ward introduces Richie as a representation of the trauma of historic racism and violence in the South. JoJo’s addicted and mostly absent mother drives him and his baby sister across the state to collect his white father from prison. The living are already haunted by race, addiction and family bonds before Richie arrives, a ghost of a boy who can’t seem to leave their farm.
How many of us have thought, “if only I had made a different decision…”? After attempting to take her own life, Nora is able to live different versions of her life to see which one she likes best, guided by her former school librarian in “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig. Norah opens different books, each an alternate reality of her life with different choices.
Many cultures don’t draw a hard line between the living and the dead as is amplified in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, one of the foremost practitioners of magical realism. The novel is set in the town of Macondo, where José Arcadio Buendía, his wife and cousin flee their home after José kills a man for taunting him about the family’s fear of conceiving a child with a pig’s tail. With flying carpets, ghosts, a woman ascending to heaven while folding the laundry and a rain that lasts four years, Márquez narrates the impossible in the same voice as the ordinary because for this family, magic is simply how their world works.
“Weyward” by Emilia Hart follows three women across four centuries, each having an uncanny connection to the natural world. In 1916, Altha stands trial for witchcraft after a local man’s death, awaiting a verdict that will decide her fate. In 1942, Violet endures a stifling life under her father’s control until a devastating betrayal casts her out, forcing her into the cottage that once belonged to her mother. In 2019, Kate flees an abusive relationship for Weyward Cottage, left to her by her late Aunt Violet. As she settles in, she begins uncovering the hidden history of the women who lived there before her.
Whether it’s a ghost on a Mississippi farm or an octopus watching two broken hearts mend, find a cozy chair and “let the magic begin.” Check out more books about magical realism.
