Magic Realism Authors

"I do believe in destiny. I believe that we are dealt a hand of cards and we have to play the game of life as best we can. And often the cards are marked."

"I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens to an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly, as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me. It just happens."

"Writing is like training to be an athlete. There is a lot of training and work that nobody sees in order to compete. The writer needs to write every day, just as the athlete needs to train. Much of the writing will never be used, but it is essential to do it. I always tell my young students to write at least one good page a day. At the end of the year they will have at least 360 good pages. That is a book."

"The role of the United States, not only in Latin America, but in many other places in the world, is unknown by many people in the United States. People here don’t know what the CIA and the American government has done abroad. And we know, because we are the ones who suffered it."

"We see stuff on TV that doesn’t look real. It looks like a video game. We don’t see the collateral damage."

"When I came to this country, I was willing to embrace everything that was good, fight against everything I thought was awful, and not lose what I brought with me, which is my language, my traditions, my way of living, hospitality, and many things that we Latins have."

"What shocks me about the issue of immigration is that globally, capital has no borders. Money goes wherever money wants to go. There are no borders, no laws, nothing, for the capitalists. And yet, for labor, for the workers, there are fences, electrified fences and bullets."

"I think that the reason to live is to learn. We come here to experience through the body things that the spirit could not experience otherwise. So we need this body, and we have to transform this body into a temple of learning. (1997)"

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy. (1994)"

"when you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same. (1994)"

"Right now I am reading a group of women writers that belong to ethnic minorities in this country. They are great writers, Chicanas, Japanese, Latinas. They are writing extraordinary works, and they are taking over the world of literature that the white men in New York monopolized. Minimalist literature is dying. And it was about time. We are seeing a return to great narrations, to the baroque narrative. We are seeing a return to artistry in words, in sentences, in the extravagance of the story itself. I am very attracted by that...Toni Morrison heads that movement. (1993, translated from Spanish by Virginia Invernizzi)"

"silence can also enrich you very much. Maya Angelou talks about a long period in her childhood when she was silent, and during those years she turned evil into action. All the evil that had happened to her she was raped-was turned into a positive strength, into energy, because of those years of silence. She reinterpreted the world, recreated reality. In a way, I think, that happened to me, too. Not as dramatically as it happened to her, but those years of silence were very necessary. Now that I've been talking and talking and talking in these lectures and in these seminars and courses and teaching, I have the feeling that all my energy is gone out, so I've decided that I will stop all interviews, all lectures. I will only do those I've already agreed to do. I will finish these obligations on October 1. And then it's my time of silence, because I need silence. Without silence I can't write. (1991)"

"There is a wonderful sentence, a statement, by one of Bertolt Brecht's characters, he says: "I am that man that goes around with a brick in his hand, to show the world how his house was." And that's the way I feel about my books in a way, that they are my bricks. I can show people what I believe my world was, so I've not lost it. (1990)"

"The best literature in this country now is being written by minorities, black women first, Chinese Americans, Chicanos, Japanese-Americans. These people are writing wonderful literature that totally defies the standards of WASP literature that is always in the New York Times, and I love it. (1990)"

"The first person to name that movement "Magical Realism," to give a label to that, was Alejo Carpentier...he abandoned the surrealists and searched in our roots, in our history, in our legends, in our folklore. He was the first one to label it. And it was wonderful because it was like giving permission to other writers to finally use their own voices. Because before that our writers were always trying to imitate Europeans, or North Americans, and were denying all our Indian background, our African influence, our own languages, and legends, and myths. This was just an open door for all that. I think that was the beginning of the Boom. That really gave a lot of people permission to do anything. But it's not a literary device, it's part of our life. The magic is still there. Because magic, in my case, stands for emotions...Maybe we deal with them in different forms, but we all feel them in the same way (1990)"

"I acknowledge that One Hundred Years, like the works of Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, Neruda, Amado, among others, opened the road for me."

"The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt."

"For me, feminism is a fight that men and women must wage for a more educated world, one in which the basic inequality between the sexes will be eliminated. We have to change the patriarchal, hierarchical, authoritarian, repressive societies that have been marked by the religions and the laws that we have had to live with for thousands of years. This goes a lot deeper than not wearing a bra, or the sexual and cultural revolutions. It is a revolution that must go to the heart of the world, and that all of us must fight, women and men alike. Both sexes are on a ship without a course, and we must give it a new direction."

"I don't pretend to be anyone's voice. I have been very lucky to be published in Europe, and I say lucky because there are women who have been writing in Latin America since the seventeenth century, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The problem is that few people ever talk about them. Their work is rarely taught at the universities, there is no literary criticism on them, and they are not published, translated or distributed."

"When I write, I fly to another dimension. Like Eva Luna, I try to live life as I would like it to be, as in a novel. I am always half flying, like Marc Chagall's violinists."

"Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality. I feel that all things float within the realm of the possible. As a reader I let myself be carried away by the enchantment of a story, without worrying too much about its authenticity. As a writer I abandon myself in the same way to the necessity of telling, convinced that if something is not exactly true at this moment, it may be so tomorrow. That's the way I have found it to be in my work."

"I visualized the book as a string of beads. Each anecdote, each character, was a separate bead strung on one string. That is why I wanted to close the book where it began, as if one had fastened the clasp of a necklace. I also wanted to show that life goes in a circle, that events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself. There is no beginning and no end."

"(About The House of Spirits) All the women in my book are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men."

"I do realize that human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so great. This story of the Trueba family could have happened anywhere."

"When I left Chile, after the military coup, I lost in one instant my family, my past, my home. I felt like a tree without roots, destined to dry up and die. For many years I was paralyzed by a kind of stupor and by nostalgia, but one day in January of 1981, I decided to recover what I had lost. I sat down to write the story of a family similar to mine, the story of a country that could be mine, a continent resembling Latin America... It was almost the act of a conjurer."

"Democratic values have never disappeared from Chile. We must not confuse the Chilean nation with the dictatorship that is ruling it now. Chile is its people, its land, its past, its present, and its future. Pinochet and the evil ones who are with him are an accident in the long life of my country. They will go into history as a misfortune that darkened the sky, but they will go."

"My work as a journalist has been fundamental in my literary creations. Journalism taught me to know and love words, the tools of my trade, the material of my craft. Journalism taught me to search for truth and to try to be objective, how to capture the reader and to hold him firmly and not let him escape. It taught me to synthesize ideas and to be precise about events. And above all, it rid me of any fear of the blank page."

"Already many critics accuse Allende of imitating Garcia Márquez' novel, especially because she writes about a Latin American family, the Truebas, who, just like the Buendia family of the Colombian author, inhabit a world of magic and eccentric spirits. But Isabel Allende differs from García Márquez: she writes a feminocentric saga of free-spirited women who not only play the piano with the cover closed or make objects levitate, but also participate openly in the fight against tyranny and repression...With this book Isabel Allende joins the many spirited women who have chosen to speak for the voiceless and have had the courage to denounce the wrongdoings of their countries. She has written this novel so that all of us can remember the story of a country like Chile which had a freely elected government that was never given a chance to rule. (And there are parallels between the experience of Chile and that of other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua and El Salvador.) The House of the Spirits reclaims Chile's right to exist on its own terms. Allende writes this story because she does not want the humane and generous Chile to be forgotten. The House of the Spirits, then, is not only Chile but a metaphor for a besieged Latin America."

"I liked House of the Spirits a lot, but I wouldn't say it influenced me. A sort of brotherly - or should I say sisterly - relationship can certainly be found between House of the Spirits and Tree of Life. This year I experimented with a course entitled "Do women of the Americas have a common literature?" I selected Allende, Marita Golden... and of course Tree of Life. However, I cannot say that I consider Isabel Allende a major writer. It seems to me that as a writer, she is less comprehensive, less accomplished than Garcia Marquez."

"I come from the so-called Third World," wrote the Chilean novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende after September 11, 2001, a day that also marked the twenty-eighth anniversary of a U.S.-sponsored coup d'état against her uncle, Salvador Allende. Still, she writes, "Until only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I'm from, I would have answered, without much thought, Nowhere; or, Latin America; or, maybe, In my heart I'm Chilean. Today, however, I say I'm an American, not simply because that's what my passport verifies, or because that word includes all of America from north to south, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California; but because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can't be neutral in moments of crisis...I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States."

"The New York Times Book Review said of Isabel Allende that she is "the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists." Her voice stands out as a spectacular outcry of the "magically real." Like the Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, she has inherited the spellbound qualities of the "Boom," the literary explosion of the 1960s, when a group of young Latin American writers brought new dimensions and vitality to the Spanish language. Her characters, mostly women, move between the supernatural and the everyday life with extraordinary ease…Meeting Isabel Allende and listening to her is a rewarding experience. She tells her story in an unpretentious way, insisting on the fact that she knows nothing about literature. We fall under her charm and we can see why her characters talk the way they do: with persuasion and magic, and in a natural and straightforward manner."

"I really liked Isabelle Allende's House of the Spirits...But I also think that their [her and Garcia Márquez's] sense of indigenous people and the land is very limited. It has been pointed out that Allende uses this sort of mythos, the Indian people, as part of the novel, but they don't really appear in her work as people, as full beings."

"Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow."

"Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life."

"In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls. (p381)"

"We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see. (p384)"

"Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass. (p400)"

"Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. (p463)"

"When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road")"

"Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")"

"He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")"

"There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)"

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. (p268)"

"We never talked about the future anymore — she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history. (p282)"

"When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. (p15)"

"It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother — somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. (p20)"

"The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)"

"There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)"

"They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they've made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world? (p77)"