Episode 210: Magical Realism

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This week we will be discussing Magical Realism.

We discuss different genres of books each week, which is both fun and useful to library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many book genres out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

We want this to be fun – like a book group! And an important part of any book group is the beverages. As we start each episode, we will be enjoying our beverages; and as you – the listener – are also members of this book group, you should also have a beverage!

Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together!

Who is joining our book group this week? We are excited to welcome back returning Guest Host Kelly Kraemer from the St. John’s/St. Ben’s library! Thank you for joining us again as we discuss Magical Realism!

Beverages:

We have guests, we have our genre. We just need our beverages. Fortunately, we all came prepared with something to sip while we talk about our books. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. Each beverage will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!

Magical color changing drinks!

Bring some “magic” into your everyday life
What you’ll need: Plastic party cups, food coloring, ice, and any clear drink (I used Sprite, Fresca and Ginger Ale).

Place 2 to 3 drops of food coloring at the bottom of each party cup and let dry. Just before serving the drinks, fill each cup with ice to hide the food coloring. While you/your child/your guest watches, pour the drink over the ice, and the clear water or soda will magically turn into a color as it fills their cup! Use different colors of food coloring so that the your child/friends/guests won’t know what color to expect from their magical soda.

 

People fly when they drink hot chocolate in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous book One Hundred Years of Solitude, and since Marquez is Colombian, we thought we should drink Colombian hot chocolate. This recipe for Chocolate Santafereño is popular all around Colombia, especially in Bogotá, the countries capital. Hot chocolate is a staple in almost every Colombian home.

Ingredients:
2 ½ tablespoons sugar or to your taste
4 ½ cups whole milk
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
5 ounces sweet chocolate, chopped
Heat the milk in a saucepan on medium heat to just below the simmering point, add the chocolate. When the chocolate is melted, add the sugar and cinnamon.
Whisk vigorously or transfer to a blender. Reheat gently and serve immediately.

 

Latin America (the birthplace of the literary genre of magical realism) has many delicious beverages, but the Pisco Sour is by far one of the most popular South American drinks.  This explains why Peru and Chile both claim it as their national drink

The traditional Chilean Pisco Sour is concocted by combining 1.5 ounces Pisco, 1 ounce lemon juice, and simple syrup. Shake vigorously with ice, strain into an old fashioned glass, and enjoy.

The traditional Peruvian Pisco Sour is made slightly different – with 1.5 ounces of Pisco, 1 ounce of lime juice, simple syrup, egg white, and Angostura bitters. Combine the Pisco, lime juice, simple syrup, and egg white in a cup with ice, shake vigorously until the texture becomes smooth and frothy, then strain into an old fashioned glass. Garnish with a few dashes of Angostura bitters.

 

Genre Discussion:

Magical realism can be found in most art forms throughout the world, however the literary movement of magical realism was spearheaded by Latin American authors. Particularly from these Latin American authors it is often read as a genre of political subversion.Though every work of literature in this genre varies in its content and style, there are some characteristics that appear over and over again:

  • The story must be set in a realistic environment with magical elements. Part of the draw of magical realism is that it blurs the line between realistic fiction and fantasy by adding in elements like the presence of dead characters in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, fluidity of time in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, and telepathy in Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife.
  • Unlike in fantasy novels, authors in the magical realism genre deliberately withhold information about the magic in their created world in order to present the magical events as ordinary occurrences, and to present the incredible as normal, every-day life.


Just as the fantastic and magical elements are presented as normal, the standard structure of reality is put into question. Essentially, magical realism is a chance for authors to show an alternative to an accepted reality, which can be an incredibly powerful tool against political regimes.

The genre has become blended and conflated with other genres. Surrealism, which is more concerned with upending the accepted realities of the mind and inner self, and fabulism, which is known for putting fables and myths into a contemporary setting, are two of the more easily recognized genres that have become part and parcel of the magical realism mode.

Ultimately magical realism uses magical elements to make a point about reality. This is as opposed to stories that are solidly in the fantasy or sci-fi genres which are often separate from our own reality.

Suggested Reading Lists:

Our Book Discussion

Now we are set with our genre, our yummy beverages, and have some good background information. Let’s get to the book discussion!

Below are examples of the books we discussed; the pictures are links to Amazon. We encourage you to browse around other books by these authors too!

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
  • Swamplandia! By Karen Russell
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami
  • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

More books discussed, with some descriptions from Amazon:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them.

 

 

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone―and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.

 

 

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

The women of the Waverley family — whether they like it or not — are heirs to an unusual legacy, one that grows in a fenced plot behind their Queen Anne home on Pendland Street in Bascom, North Carolina. There, an apple tree bearing fruit of magical properties looms over a garden filled with herbs and edible flowers that possess the power to affect in curious ways anyone who eats them.

For nearly a decade, 34-year-old Claire Waverley, at peace with her family inheritance, has lived in the house alone, embracing the spirit of the grandmother who raised her, ruing her mother’s unfortunate destiny and seemingly unconcerned about the fate of her rebellious sister, Sydney, who freed herself long ago from their small town’s constraints. Using her grandmother’s mystical culinary traditions, Claire has built a successful catering business — and a carefully controlled, utterly predictable life — upon the family’s peculiar gift for making life-altering delicacies: lilac jelly to engender humility, for instance, or rose geranium wine to call up fond memories.

Garden Spells reveals what happens when Sydney returns to Bascom with her young daughter, turning Claire’s routine existence upside down. With Sydney’s homecoming, the magic that the quiet caterer has measured into recipes to shape the thoughts and moods of others begins to influence Claire’s own emotions in terrifying and delightful ways.

As the sisters reconnect and learn to support one another, each finds romance where she least expects it, while Sydney’s child, Bay, discovers both the safe home she has longed for and her own surprising gifts. With the help of their elderly cousin Evanelle, endowed with her own uncanny skills, the Waverley women redeem the past, embrace the present, and take a joyful leap into the future.

 

 

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut’s experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star.

Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

 

 

Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury

Douglas Spaulding at twelve is suddenly excitingly aware of the world around him, of the magic and wonder and understanding that had passed him by. His neighbors take on new dimensions. Death and old age as universal factors of living shock him to the depths. A country summer becomes something that must be seized and recorded with every passing hour. A friend who has been all-compassing moves from town; it is almost more than he can bear — and he turns to his small brother with unexpected attachment. The dandelion wine becomes a symbol of successive events, week by week. This is not a novel. Rather is it a blend of nostalgic recall — very definitely an adult remembering, interpreting, philosophizing over the brief period of awakening that belongs to adolescence, and episodes about incidents, often horrors, related to other people in the town. There’s a succession of murders of young women; there’s a newcomer, an old lady, who learns through the children not to cling to her past; there’s a strange love affair between an elderly spinster and a young newspaper man; there’s an ancient whose vivid reliving of his past brings history to life for the boy listeners. Douglas is now a central figure, now a participant, and frequently merely a passer-by in the lives of his elders. This demands rather special handling and understanding. The poignant quality of Bradbury’s writing, the evocative elements that will capture others than his usual audience, combine to make this an unusual reading experience

 

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s — 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers..

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us for this great discussion of Magical Realism on our Reading with Libraries podcast! A special thank you to Guest Host Kelly Kraemer for joining us again! We will be back next Tuesday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is surprisingly fun! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here next Thursday!