Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
On the Fatal Shore
By John Banville
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
by Richard Flanagan
Grove, 404 pp., $27.50
Magical realism was invented, or reinvented, to address realities that seemed unmanageable—too big, too bizarre, too teemingly chaotic—for the ordinary modes of realistic fiction. As a way of writing novels, magical realism was perhaps not as original or as revolutionary as it seemed when we first encountered The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude; the presentation of the extraordinary as if it were the everyday is as old as Don Quixote. What was new about Günter Grass's and Gabriel García Márquez's novels was the way in which they managed to make real diamonds out of the ashes of contemporary history. Little Oskar's tin drum rattled up an authentic rhythm for postwar Germany, while the mystical doings of the Buendía clan expressed both the seething passions and the melancholy languors of tropical Colombia.
Review, 3208 words
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