The best books to capture the magic of magical realism

This novel is a great way to start enjoying magical realism. It’s about a family—a hard-boiled mother and her three daughters who live on a ranch in northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.

The youngest daughter, named Tita, is told that it is an unalterable family tradition for the youngest daughter not to marry but to stay home and take care of her mother. Tita obeys but with very interesting (and magical) consequences.

Food is the source of much of the magic in this novel, and if you love cooking and eating, you’ll love this magic! And because the story is set during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), revolutionary soldiers gallop through the ranch with magical and sometimes disastrous results.

I loved this novel because it combines politics and history, as well as romance and humor. 

The House of the Spirits tells the story of a family in an unnamed Latin American country over the course of fifty years, starting in the 1920s. We get to know four generations of Del Valle women, each of whom has a mystical side that allows her to commune with spirits and act upon the insights that these spirits provide.

There is also the patriarch of the family, Esteban Trueba, who is quite the opposite of the women in his family—a strongman whose exercise of economic and political power has terrible consequences.

The name of the country where the novel takes place isn’t mentioned, but we know that it is Chile because the plot moves inexorably toward 9/11/1973, the date of the military coup in Chile that led to thousands of “disappeared” or exiled citizens.

The personal and the political are well balanced in this novel because while we are deeply engaged in the lives of the characters, we also watch as a long-standing democracy crumbles and finally falls to a military dictatorship. Allende is herself Chilean and a relative of the President of Chile who was murdered during the military take-over in 1973.

This novel is her first, and it serves as a memoir of her family’s experiences, both political and personal, bitter and sweet.

The Kingdom of this World is written by a Cuban writer and pits two worldviews against each other—the Afro-Haitian and the French.

This short novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century in Haiti, and the French are trying to maintain control of their colonies in the Caribbean. We see these different world views from both points of view so that the same event can have disastrously different meanings.

We follow the Haitian slave, Ti Noel, who reports on “magical” happenings that stem from his Haitian belief in shape-shifting: men can take flight if necessary, or transform themselves into animals or insects, or otherwise do what the French consider “magic” and the Haitians consider normal. We see events from the French point of view of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon and wife of a French general who was sent to Haiti to put down the slave revolt. 

As readers, we watch as these two cultures collide as things are thrown into chaos. This novel is a fascinating account of historical events that set in motion the difficulties that still face Haiti today. 

This short novel is by a Mexican writer and takes place underground. At first, we cannot tell who is living and who is dead, but we eventually accept the fact that the characters are ghosts. 

The ghosts come and go, remembering their past lives together. They remind each other of the events of the Mexican Revolution that they lived through, and they especially remember the strongman in the village. Pedro Páramo runs things with an iron hand, and he also pines for a woman who is beyond his control—the only thing he wants that he can’t have.

The voices in this novel are like a chorus of whispers breathing the picture of a poor village. I love the beauty and mystery of the writing. Many Mexicans consider this their greatest novel, and for all readers, it is a small masterpiece. 

I was in the Peace Corps in Colombia when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and fell in love with this kind of fiction (which we now call magical realism).

It is set in a poor village where magical things happen, and no one gives it a second thought. There is also a political story that reflects historical events in Colombia and in other parts of Latin America.

The author won the Nobel Prize in 1982, and no writer can be more highly acclaimed than that. Oprah chose it for her book club (well, that’s pretty high acclaim, too), and I love it.