SOURCE: “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” translated by Wendy B. Faris, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 119-24.

In the following essay, Leal presents an overview of magic realism in Latin-American fiction.

In his article on “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Professor Angel Flores proposes the year 1935 as marking the birth of magical realism.¹ For Flores, Jorge Luis Borges' book A Universal History of Infamy, which appeared that year, marks the new trend in Hispanic American narrative. According to Flores, Borges' work reflects the influence of Kafka, whose stories the author of the Aleph had translated and published two years earlier.² “In his laboriously precisionist way,” says Flores, “Kafka had mastered from his earliest short stories—‘The Judgment,’ (1912) ‘Metamorphosis’ (1916)—the difficult art of mingling his drab reality with the phantasmal world of his...