You could argue that Colombian writers, who are abandoning the so-called magical-realism style for which Latin American literature is best known, don't need it anymore anyway. After 41 years of guerrilla war and the wild excesses of the cocaine trade, plain reality is sufficiently unbelievable.
Most of their works have not been translated or published abroad, and a persistent desire among readers in Europe and the United States for Latin Americans for novels about levitating priests and babies with tails rankles the region's new generation of urban novelists.
A case in point is Efraim Medina, another Colombian and author of the decidedly unmagical-realist novel "Batman and Robin's Mutual Masturbation Techniques."
Medina suggested that his Nobel-Prize-winning compatriot Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose "One Hundred Years of Solitude" brought magical realism to the attention of the English-speaking world when published in 1970, should "do something for Colombia and donate himself to a museum." Burn. (via
Bookninja)
# posted by
Gerry Canavan @ 12:12 AM
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