My book group recently read Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto – published in Portuguese in 1992 and translated by David Brookshaw in 2006. It was chosen by a member of the group who is from Mozambique – and the novel is about the Mozambican civil war. Sort of.
It takes place in the midst of the civil war, at least, mostly in an area that has been devastated by it. An older man (Tuahir) and a young boy (Muidinga) are travelling together – it is not clear what the relationships between them is, and Muidinga doesn’t remember all the details of his recent past – though he does remember his lost brother Juney. They have left a refugee camp, and wander until they find a bus to camp out in, even if it is filled with massacred bodies and has been burned.
In that bus, Muidinga finds a notebook detailing the adventures of Kindzu, and Muidinga reads the story aloud to Tuahir. Later, he continues the story as they leave the bus and walk on – though Tuahir has manipulated a path that leads them in circles.
The writing is rich and deep with imagery. It is evocative even while it doesn’t quite cohere into understandable patterns. Here’s a quick example:
After all, I was born at a time when time doesn’t happen. Life, my friends, no longer lets me inside it. I am condemned to perpetual earth, like the whale that gives up the ghost on the beach. If one day I try and live somewhere else, I shall have to carry with me the road that doesn’t let me depart from myself.
I don’t speak Portuguese, but certainly the translation never felt awkward – it seemed to mimic the right sort of confusion for the narrative, if you see what I mean. And what I have not mentioned is this is also a work of magical realism – so, fantastic things happen to the characters (both in Kindzu’s notebook and in the ‘real’ world of Muidinga and Tuahir). People turn suddenly to dust; dead people come back to life. Nothing is quite as it seems, and there is no sense that anything is expected to be. Unlike fantastic fiction, where these moments would surprise the characters, the tenets of magical realism mean that everything is accepted.
And so on to my title. I realised that I’d never before read a book so utterly foreign to me, in every sense of that word. And I hadn’t before realised that I need some frame of reference in order to work out what I think of a novel – and how I react to it.
This is partly (but only partly) because I don’t know anything about Mozambique. Except the capital, since I learned all the world capitals! It was useful having the guy in book group who could explain the context – not just of the civil war, but of many moments that was allusions to Mozambican myths or sayings or historical figures. It added to the tapestry. But my main issue was the magical realism – because, I realised, I have never read a magical realist novel before.
Fantasy, yes. Sci-fi, yes. And fantastic fiction – to the extent of writing a doctoral thesis on it. And I’ve read academic works about the concept of magical realism – but I can’t remember ever reading a real example. And I found it unsettling.
I eventually realised why. It wasn’t that I dislike fantastic things happening in literature – it’s that I need there to be rules around them. In, say, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (of course!), Norman accidentally conjures Miss Hargreaves into being. His whims dictate her personality and traits – and that is the limits of the fantastic. The novel’s rules are not our rules, but they a consistent and bound. If anything can happen at any point, then there is no consistency in the world’s rules – but, more importantly, there are no bounds for what our emotional response is intended to be. There are no stakes, because there is no firm foundation.
I’m sure plenty of readers can emotionally engage with magical realism and the characters in them. There are probably plenty on my side of the equation. But I felt, without a frame of reference either in the world of the book or outside it, that I had no clue how to engage with Sleepwalking Land. I finished it without even knowing if I’d like it or not. I’d certainly read something else by Couto, if he ever wrote/writes something non-magical-realism – otherwise, at least I have more frame of reference for my next one.
I’ve never really got on with magic realism. I think that’s why most books from South America haven’t appealed to me very much.
I’m with Lisa in struggling to engage with magical realism. It’s hard to find authors from South America that write in any other way though.
Setting that aside though your point about a frame of reference struck a chord. I can remember reading one novel by an Indian author where I ended up making a list of all the words I didn’t recognise and then going to my work colleagues in India for explanations. Some of them related to clothing, others to various gods and of course some historical/political events.
Not only was the experience of learning about those things enriching, it also helped create an even stronger bond with my colleagues who were delighted to have someone take an interest in their country
I still don’t understand what magical realism is, although I have read several books that contain it. Perhaps you are right that it is supernatural material that follows no consistent rules. In some cases, like Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I don’t mind it but in others, like Rushdie’s books, I can’t stand it. It only serves to made the story opaque and confusing. Of course, I consider William Faulkner just as annoyingly opaque and confusing. It feels pretentious to me.
And yet, Like Water for Chocolate is considered magical realism, but I wouldn’t categorize it that way. To me, it made sense; the emotions of the cook transfer to the people who eat her food. It was consistent. I consider that speculative fiction. The film Amelie is also considered magical realism, but I know many people who liked it even if they wouldn’t have liked One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I can’t quite work out the difference between speculative fiction (Miss Hargreaves, Lady into Fox, Harlan Ellison’s short story Jeffty is Five) and magical realism. Maybe it’s that the characters accept the magic as normal. The characters in Like Water for Chocolate accept the magic as a matter of course. The author isn’t saying, “let’s have this magic thing happen and see how the characters cope with it.”
In Jeffty is Five, the story starts out with two 5-year-old boys who are friends, but then Jeffty stays 5. Also, Jeffty can continue to access things that were available when he was 5, like radio shows and a decoder ring. The bulk of the story is how his parents cope with that, how Jeffty is treated. In magical realism, I’m guessing the characters would accept that Jeffty is always 5 and that wouldn’t be the main plot device, but rather a symbol of something.
Interesting post, Simon, and I’m not sure if i’ve read magic realism though I have read (successfully!) plenty of sci fi and fantasy over the years. And I think I get what you say – there does need to be structure in any kind of invented world because every world does have some kind of rules. I wonder where Charles Williams sits in all this…
If you’re curious enough to explore the question from a different direction, you might find some podcast interviews with writers who are associated with magical realism and listen to the discussions (but if you’re not interested in writing this would probably bore you silly). I’ve found them very helpful and find it quite fascinating that this is a term which is not necessarily employed by those who are often said to be writing it, that the writers themselves often see that content rather differently (than critics/scholars/reviewers/marketers/copywriters) and often in what I found to be surprisingly ordinary ways. And I do agree that having context (especially for works with a political and/or mythic side) is essential; reading without it feels very disconnected.
The only magical realism books that really grabbed me were the ones by Gabriel Garcia Marquez-especially “Love in the Time of Cholera” but also “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” They were fascinating and so well written. I sure do love your blog. You and your readers have introduced me to so many wonderful writers. Thank you.
You know, now that you mention it, I’m not sure I can draw to mind a single example of magical realism that I’ve read – except maybe The Alchemist? (I’m such a newb to magical realism, I’m not even sure if that “counts”.) I tend to be pretty good at going with the flow, on the whole, but I do struggle sometimes regarding context when it comes to historical fiction (in large part, I end up feeling super uncomfortable that I don’t know more about world history and it kind of spoils my enjoyment of the book) – recently reading A Passage To India is a good example, I thought I had a handle on the British Raj, but apparently not :|
You have put into words exactly what I feel about magical realism/ fantasy: unless there are rules and boundaries to what can happen in the world of the story, I can never connect with it.