Volume 43, Number 1 · January 11, 1996
Melting into Air
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Island of the Day Before
by Umberto Eco, translated from Italian by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace, 515 pp., $25.00
Of Love and Other Demons
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 147 pp., $21.00
We know there is one branch of fiction, godfathered by Kafka and Borges, which has abandoned the pretense that it really happened for fantasy and joke, miracle and fairy tale. 'It's all a magic trick,' its authors say. 'See how I do it?' This is fun, and often clever; but, like other forms of modern experimenting ('A chair doesn't really look like this'), it makes it less easy than with writers of realistic fiction to sort out the masters from the copyists and the frauds. Not everyone who waves a wand is a Prospero.
Review, 3491 words
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