The Husbands

Magical Realism is a sub-genre of fiction closely associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Juan Rulfo pioneered the genre. In fact, the term “magical realism” dates to well before this era, as it was coined in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to describe a movement in Central European painting. It was not until 1955 that the term was used in literary criticism, as critic Ángel Flores applied the term to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s “A Universal History of Infamy.” Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the writer most often associated with magical realism. His canonical short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is sometimes seen as defining the “rules” of the genre. In the story, the titular very old man with enormous wings appears “face down in the mud” of a rural village after a period of intense rain. No one knows how he got there, and he speaks a language no one understands. Though his appearance initially shocks the villagers and prompts intense speculation about whether he is an angel, Márquez’s descriptions of his body and the people and events around him remain scrupulously rooted in the concrete and the mundane.

This placing of magical events within an otherwise ordinary world is a hallmark of magical realism, and in this way, the genre is much closer to realism than to fantasy or science fiction. In a typical magical realist story, all aspects of the fictional world are realistic with the exception of one or two magical aspects. Importantly, in this genre, the magical element is accepted as real, and plausibility is not questioned. Some point to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—in which Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to discover he has become a beetle, but never questions how this has happened or how he might transform himself back to a human—as an early example of the genre. The fantastical element in a work of magical realism is treated as a given and goes unquestioned; its plausibility is not presented for debate by either the characters within the work or the reader. Likewise, authors of the genre generally do not reveal the inner workings or cause of the magical element; the aim is to adopt the surreal element seamlessly into an ordinary, everyday world with which the reader is familiar.

In some instances, magical realism can be used as a form of social commentary or critique. This is the case in Gramazio’s novel, which examines—through the lens of narrator Lauren’s experience being “married” to more than 200 men—the cultural expectations surrounding marriage. This critical element of magical realism grew naturally out of the environment of much of Latin America in the 20th century, as many nations sought to define themselves in opposition to US and European imperialism. In contemporary magical realism, this feature endures in numerous novels: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) uses vampires and shapeshifters to examine the American/Iraq Wars and climate change; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is set against the backdrop of India’s independence from British rule; in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), a couple escapes a country ravaged by civil war through a series of magical doors. Other notable works of 20th and 21st-century magical realism include Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989); Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020); Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002); Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019); Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001); and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).