Latin American authors opt for realism over magic

Colombian novelist Jorge Franco isn't a magical realist. He is just a realist. His novel ''Rosario Tijeras'' features a corpse that gets taken to a party and a criminal heroine who french-kisses her victims before blowing their
brains out.
You could argue that Colombian writers, who are abandoning the so-called magical realism style for which Latin American literature is best known, don't need it any more. After 41 years of guerrilla war and the wild excesses of the cocaine trade, plain reality is sufficiently unbelievable.
Most of their works have not been translated or published abroad, and a persistent desire among readers in Europe and the United States for Latin American novels about levitating priests and babies with tails rankles the region's new generation of urban novelists.
A case in point is Efraim Medina, another Colombian and author of the decidedly unmagical-realist novel ''Batman and Robin's Mutual Masturbation Techniques''. Medina suggested that his Nobel Prize-winning compatriot Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, whose ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' brought magical realism to the attention of the English-speaking world when published in 1970, should ''do something for Colombia and donate himself to a museum''.
When asked about magical realism, Franco was calmer than Medina. ''Personally, I wasn't affected at all by the shadow of Garcia Marquez,'' the slightly built, soft-spoken author told Reuters in his mother's Bogota apartment. He added that the now 77-year-old writer had been very kind to him and that Medina was always looking for a fight.
But he had to concede one thing when talking about himself and other new generation Latin American novelists, such as Colombia's Santiago Gamboa and Peru's Jaime Bayly.
''It's true that, when we're looking for our work to be translated into other languages, especially in rich countries, you still feel that what they really want is magical realism. The flying grandmothers and other funny things, the yellow butterflies.''
Magical realism emerged at a time when Latin America was modernizing quickly. National self-confidence and left-wing thought assigned a new importance to rural folk traditions long marginalized by the European culture of the upper classes.

Encouraged by the example of surrealism and its pursuit of the irrational, writers like Garcia Marquez and Mexico's Juan Rulfo structured narratives around magical events presented in an uncritical way. So, in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'', there is a plague of insomnia and it rains for four years after a massacre of banana workers. Reuters