How Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me To Appreciate the Quotidian
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How Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me To Appreciate the Quotidian

Can we experience magic realism outside of escapism?

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How Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me To Appreciate the Quotidian
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As a Colombian bibliophile from a clan of pedagogs it was a requirement that I read "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and I absolutely loved it. Save for "The Colonel Has No One to Write Him" and Garcia Marquez' essays, I inherited the family library of his works.

Garcia Marquez is most famous for his use of magic realism, which introduces sublime aspects of magic into an otherwise quotidian world such as characters living extraordinary long lives, flying, or communicating with the dead. However, as much as I'm fascinated by these magic circumstances, what most impressed me is Garcia's descriptions of everyday, otherwise mundane interactions and behaviors.

Having the cultural context and an affinity for cataloging human behavior, I was mesmerized by the way Garcia Marquez captured behaviors I have seen my entire life. The myriad of emotions and hidden dialogue expressed by the scattered sighs and moments of silence between a couple that has been together for decades or the stalwart, borderline obsessive ways in which older men cling to past glory or unfulfilled dreams. The quiet dignity or stalwart determination by which a tough-as-nails matriarch will impose order on her relationship or household or the pangs of unrequited love.

The latest book of his I've read was "Memories of my Melancholy Whores" and the characters constant inner monologue reminded of the oceans of introspection, broken by few lucid moments of real life failing to adhere to the picture in our heads that I experienced in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".

The reason this recent appreciation for the mundane is such a fascination for me is that, like Hamilton, I'm never satisfied. I'm vexed to mire in a near perpetual ennui caused by a dissatisfaction with the routine and a penchant for the fantastic. Whether this idiosyncrasy is more motivated by a need for the novel or an aversion to the common I can't quite say but it has made escapism the operative word.

The Man of La Mancha taught that "too much sanity may be madness and maddest of all is to see the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be" and I quite agree though I'm largely a product of the fallacious tendency to measure life against the fantasy in my head and up woefully disappointed.

What is the solution then?

Do we get lost in our fantasy worlds and avoid the mundane reality like a plague?

Do we resign ourselves to forget the red pill and swallow the blue one?

Maybe the solution is to enjoy our flights of fancy for they are but do our best to find those bits and bobs of magic in our everyday lives. Maybe we can live in magic realism instead of chasing it in books. (Still though, read his books. You won't regret it.)

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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