Thanks to my friend Shamashis, who introduced me to the works of
Borges, I'm not totally new to
magical realism. Those were but short stories.
Marquez dishes out magic on a much larger scale. He writes just after the arrival of the railroad.
It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.
New inventions, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc arrived at Macondo from the "civilized" world. The people of Macondo, who accepted flying carpets and miraculous rains of yellow flowers as part of the real, started doubting the reality of the newly arrived technological inventions.
One of the people who doubted the reality of the telephone is the
ghost of José Arcadio Buendía! Engrossed in the text I tend to lose track of what is real and what is not?
