SOURCE: "Novels Borges Never Wrote," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 11, 1988, pp. 1, 6.

An American novelist who received many literary awards for his first novel, Imagining Argentina (1987), Thornton is also the author of Unbodied Hope: Narcissism and the Modern Novel (1984). In the following review, he judges The Dream of Heroes impressive and highly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, while finding Diary of the War of the Pig only partially developed.

Most people would agree that Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez are the major practitioners of magic realism, but even though they work the same generic terrain, their methods are markedly different.

García Márquez's world of flesh and blood is filled with characters possessing supernatural powers. Objects are transformed in crescendos of images or materialize out of nowhere, as is the case with the galleon in the jungle of One Hundred Years of...