What is the author's style in Where the Air Is Clear by Carlos Fuentes?

Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier first used the term "magical realism" in the 1940s to describe the tendency of contemporary Latin American authors to use the elements of folklore, myth, and fantasy in descriptions of their everyday issues, especially to veil the political and historical problems of his day in mystical narration. An exemplary magical realist novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez; other writers in this tradition are the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Argentines Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges, the Chilean Isabel Allende, and Fuentes. This generation of Latin American novelists usually focuses on the major theme of searching for epic and heroic universal "Truths" in their works; in the highly symbolic language and narrative shifts from the realistic to the mythological, these authors employ the fantastic in order to illuminate the mundane elements of life.

In Where the Air Is Clear, the lack of separation between 1950s Mexico and the mythology of Aztec gods is magical realism. Superstition or witchcraft is not sufficient, rather the fantastic notion that Ixca is the Aztec god of war trying to bring back the pantheon of Aztec gods to avenge their dethronement makes the novel a member of the magical realist genre.