Garcia Marquez, Macondo and McOndo

The death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez prompted a euphoric celebration of the man who made magic realism a reality. His magnum opus 100 Years of Solitude shattered the decades-old tradition that kept Latin American novelists confined to hyper-local expressions of their country’s cultural identity written for the psyche of their own compatriots. The saga of the fictional town of Macondo used universal themes of love, isolation and despair to give the rest of the world a window into a region whose literature had until then been intensely navel-gazing.

But few Gabo obituaries mentioned that most of his work actually wasn't magic realism. Love in the Time of Cholera is a 50-year love story that features no magic butterflies and no super-human beauty. Nobody Writes to the Colonel is about an aging veteran struggling to avoid starvation as he waits for a pension he’ll never get. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is Faulkner-esque tale of a murder that everyone in town knew would happen but almost nobody tried to stop.

The breathtaking imagination of 100 Years of Solitude would ultimately overshadow not only Gabo's own work but also that of a generation of Latin American writers. Gabo's three best-known literary contemporaries – Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar and Mexico's Carlos Fuentes – penned nary a magic realist yarn. That never prevented the genre from becoming canonized as an intrinsically Latin American style. The frequent explanation was that a region where routine occurrences feature such monumental absurdity can’t be presented just like any other place on earth.

Nor did magic realism escape its link to Latin America when authors around the world wrote books that could be readily identified as such. Tony Morrison's Beloved chronicled the story of an escaped American slave who kills her daughter to keep her from being returned to captivity, only to have the child’s ghost return years later. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children describes the independence of India through the eyes of a child with mystical clairvoyance. Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle (along with a number of other novels) features an unemployed middle-aged, cat-owning Tokyo resident who inhabits parallel universes and vicariously lives World-War-II-era experiences. But Morrison, Rushdie and Murakami all instinctively backed away from calling their work magic realism, almost as if they were hesitant to be pushed into a category already so intimately linked to Latin America.

And the converse started to become true as well – writing that wasn't sufficiently magic realist was passed off as insufficiently Latin American. Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet discovered this in 1994 when he submitted a story based on his middle-class upbringing in Santiago to an international writing workshop at the University of Iowa. He described the response in a 1997 piece for Salon:

In a polite letter, I was gently told that it wasn't what they were looking for. In fact, the story I had written could easily have taken place right here, in America, they said.

Regular stories about regular people were no longer fit for a region of magic fairy creatures, mystically endowed spirits and incomprehensibly complex genealogies. The genre that had once freed Latin America from its criollista straitjacket had left writers in a literary ghetto. A backlash was born.

Fuguet helped start a movement called McOndo, a snarky melding of 100 Years of Solitude's Macondo with McDonald’s that implied both the commoditization of magic realism and the unromantic reality of modern Latin America. They wrote about modern nations of regular human beings whose attire, diet and day-to-day experiences often look like those of boring old Americans. McOndo actively turned its back on “sagas of sweaty migrant farm laborers, the plight of misunderstood political refugees … the spicy violence of the barrio” and, most of all, the theatrical fantasy of magic realism. The writers wanted to be free to tell stories of guys in highschool trying to figure out how to ask girls out, of young professionals trying to deal with failing marriages, of people who spend more time shopping in malls than talking to the ghosts of their dead relatives.

I have to admit that, after fully enjoying the writing of Gabo and his contemporaries, I didn't give McOndo much of a chance. The two novels of that school that I did read seemed to be reaching too hard for a hyper-modern Latin American of internet-savvy polyglots who gave themselves nicknames like “Pixel” and traveled seamlessly between Latin and North America. Sueños Digitales or Digital Dreams by McOndo standard-bearer Edmundo Paz Soldan seemed artificially drenched in high-tech modernity while still relying on staid Latin American literary themes like dictatorial governments and uncontrollable jealousy. Eventually I ditched both Macondo and McOndo in favor of reporting and writing, which is what I probably should have been doing for most of the time I was reading all that fiction.

But at its heart I have to respect what the McOndo movement stands for: an explicit recognition that Latin America is not as exotic a place as foreigners might like it to be. And that the experiences of middle class Latin Americans aren't less valid just because they could have happened in Ohio. Life in Latin America does of course carry its own brand of byzantine absurdity. But it's not much more absurd than, for example, this preposterous Third World, Banana Republic chicanery nearly paralyzing the world’s wealthiest nation. Or the saga of a group of Americans who demand respect for property rights and simultaneously demand to use government land for free. And that a militia leader questioning whether black Americans are worthy of doing anything other than picking cotton could be quickly defended by black soldiers. Or, to be honest, this. In America these things are “quirky” or “unusual.” South of the border, they're magical and mystical.

Perhaps I'm biased by the frequent pressure on correspondents to make places look more exotic than they actually are. The reliance, for example, on the words “carnival” and “samba” in any headline about Brazil. Or the longform yarns from remote datelines that describe salt-of-the-earth natives carrying out evening rituals without the benefit of electricity – seemingly in rural idylls of yesteryear – only to reveal later that the village's diesel generators get cut off at sundown.

My favorite piece of contemporary Latin American fiction remains Falke. It appealed to me because of its granular historical description of places I've visited, events that actually occurred, and real people who lived and worked within a mile of where I now sit. For me it’s the realism that matters. Truly celebrating the legacy of magic realism requires knowing when it’s time to let the world be what it is. Or to borrow (perhaps awkwardly) from Murakami:

“People say it's magic realism – but in the depths of my soul, it's just realism. Not magical.”