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Check it Out: When the Lines of Reality Blur

Submitted by B. Wood on

There’s a delightful mystery called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan that weaves in a touch of magical realism. Magical realism refers to a story that takes place in the real world, but has some fantastical elements. To paraphrase Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, it’s only mostly true. Founded by Latinx authors, magical realism is often associated with their cultural histories, and may contain political elements. Fabulism is similar, but is more global and also uses more elements of fables or fairy tales. In both of these styles, magic is not explained, as though it is within our expectation that it would occur. By contrast, surrealism as a subgenre contains illogical and/or dreamlike narratives. All three of these sub-genres have similarities, and many titles contain elements of more than one sub-genre.

The term “magical realism” achieved popular use by the 1940s, but fabulism dates back much further, even as far as the 1700s. André Breton is considered to have founded surrealism in 1924. Award- winning authors in these fields include Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Olga Tokarczuk, Yann Martel, Haruki Murakami - but not everything written by these authors falls into these sub-genres. Here are some examples of books that are strong in these sub-genres:

As always, you can find these books and authors at your library. See you there!

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