The Maudlin Fantastic and the Magic of Truth: On Gabriel García Márquez — sfsignal.com

It is hard to resist the pull of hagiographic adulation when writing about an author such as Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, who died on 17 April. He was one of the most beloved literary figures of the 20th Century and his major novels quickly became classics. He was an avatar (if not progenitor) of “La Boom,” the explosion of Latin American literature onto the world stage in the 1960s. Quotable, avuncular, and enigmatic, García Márquez is a figure of great importance in world literature, the most lauded practitioner of “magical realism” in fiction. He is, in a way, a saint of letters. Which is why the pull of hagiography feels so proper and fruitful to resist. García Márquez is one of the writers who taught me through his fiction to distrust saints and to look for magic in the everyday, to see how glimmers of hope come not from faerie dust but the twinkle of an eye and how even that can blind us to the manifolds sorceries that we all conjure as we create and re-create ourselves and our world with every action. And those actions are themselves flawed as they gather or dilute the potential to generate change. We too often trap each other, and ourselves, in a web of reality that captures, rather than harnesses, the magic all around us.

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