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.