Like “narrative” or “culture,” “magical realism” is one of those terms that has always boggled critics. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist, probably coined the term in 1949, and for him it entailed a matter-of-fact mingling of the mundane and fantastical, specifically in Latin American fiction. Fredric Jameson used it more broadly, finding its expression in film and other national literatures. In a 1986 essay in Critical Inquiry, he attributed the rise of the genre, which he likens to a hallucinogenic drug, to the “the waning of larger historical perspectives and narratives.” In fact, he sees it as “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism,” whatever that means.
Perhaps Alona Kimhi, the Ukrainian-born Israeli, has an answer. Her second novel, Lily la Tigresse, offers enough hallucinogenic drugs, and other mind-bending substances, including love, to set the reader awhirl. While it isn’t set in Latin America, we get the same sweltering streets, the same rampant corruption, the same plaguing lust and despair, as we would in a Marquez novel. Or perhaps Bulgakov, given Kimhi’s Soviet heritage.
