Art by Stephany Torres
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), a series adapted from the most famous work from Nobel Prize of Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez is now on Netflix. The novel is widely considered one of the greatest examples of magical realism aka a literary style that combines magical elements with a world where the same rules we understand still apply.
Latin America was one of the birthplaces of the literary style, and many of its writers wrote what would go on to become the works that would define magical realism. It’s important to note that this list is a little too white and skews too male because the times were what they were, but if the new Netflix adaptation has you interested in magical realism, here are 7 other classic books like One Hundred Years of Solitude to check out.
Published in 1955, Pedro Páramo is the “otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.” It now has a movie on Netflix starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.
Published in 1989, Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate) is a “classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother’s womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef, using cooking to express herself and sharing recipes with readers along the way.” Like Water for Chocolate now has a show on Max starring Azul Guaita from Rebelde.
Published in 1982, The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) focuses on the Trueba family. “The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.” The House of the Spirits has a 1993 movie starring Meryl Streep. And Prime Video has an upcoming adaptation starring Culpa Tuya’s Nicole Wallace.
Written and published between 1947 and 1956, Fictions (Ficciones) “The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return.”
Published in 1963, Hopscotch (Rayuela) revolves around the life of Horacio Olivera, an intellectual from Argentina who lives in Paris in the 1950s, and how “a child’s death and La Maga’s (his girlfriend) disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum.”
Published in 1962, Aura by Carlos Fuentes tells the story of Felipe Montero, a man “employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband’s memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.”
Published in 1966, Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) tells the story of the lonely widow Doña Flor, who finds herself “attracted to Dr. Teodoro Madureria, a kind, considerate pharmacist, who is everything the reckless Vadinho dos Guimaraes (her husband) was not. Yet after their marriage, though content, Flor longs for her first husband’s amorous, and exhausting, sensual pleasures. And Flor’s desirous longing is so powerful that it brings the ghost of Vadinho back from the grave–right into her bed.” It was adapted into a film in 1976.
