Essays on Magical Realism

The Grass Dancer, a book written by Susan Power, who descends from the Native American Sioux people, fascinates the reader with the elaborateness of the plot, complex kinship and thematic saturation. Power weaves a complex story of life and relationships of a young Sioux Harley Wind Soldier living in a reservation in Dakota and struggling to regain his identity. However, the far from being one-sided or hackneyed: the author deploys various techniques to portray the story of the entire Sioux Nation through the array of interrelated characters. However, the main peculiarity of the book lies in Power’s careful ...

“Like Water for Chocolate” is a drama and a romance about the lives of women in Mexico The following quote is from chapter six titled “A Recipe for Making Match and it describes the way Mexican women thought about love, about passion and about life in general and everything was connecting with cooking. “My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this ...

The best recipe for a dish to be delicious is preparing it with love – Tita, the heroine of “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, is sure. That is certainly the formula Esquivel resorts to creating her novel, where love is a key ingredient, and the food for thought produced by the book is savory, hot and rich. “Tita remembered that Nacha had always said that when people argue while preparing tamales, the tamales won’t get cooked. They can be heated day after day and still stay raw, because the tamales are angry. In a case like that, ...

Marquez’ worldwide reputation of a prolific and outstanding author is undeniable. His international recognition reached its peak in 1982 when he got the Nobel Prize in Literature. Because of the poverty of Colombia, Marquez experienced and witnessed economic and social inequity that was one of the most dramatic on the Latin American continent. Marquez employs national history to produce plots that surprise readers because of the writer’s ability to combine techniques of the fantastic and realism. To be more exact, Marquez was the master of a style, which is known as magic realism. It helped the author to ...

In terms of both our vocations and hobbies, we often aspire to become great. What happens, however, when this very desire consumes and overtakes us? The 2010 film "Black Swam" starring Natalie Portman as a high-profile ballet dancer, shows its viewers that unchecked ambition can be a dangerous and ultimately deadly thing. This message is achieved primarily through the film's use of detail-heavy camerawork, its character depiction, and its embrace of magical realism and distortions of reality. The main character Nina loses her identity, herself to become perfect and on this way to the culmination of her transformation she ...

Introduction

This novel revolves around kitchen, and its contextual interpretation is in the Mexican society. The recipe was a major element to the Mexican kitchen, and it signified the life endeavors in this society. The thesis of this essay is a discussion on various attributes of the Mexican kitchen through the ailing Mama Elena, her three daughters and the surrounding love inferno between Tita and Pedro in the contextual ranch setup. 1. What was the general interpretation of this novel, and what impacts did it have? ( what conversations did it start or what understanding did the book generally bring to ...

In terms of both our vocations and hobbies, we often aspire to become great. What happens, however, when this very desire consumes and overtakes us? The 2010 film "Black Swam" starring Natalie Portman as a high-profile ballet dancer, shows its viewers that unchecked ambition can be a dangerous and ultimately deadly thing. This message is achieved primarily through the film's use of detail-heavy camerawork, its character depiction, and its embrace of magical realism and distortions of reality.  The film's camerawork often becomes consumed with details in a way that is strange or even unsettling for a viewer. One of ...

The House of Spirits by Isabella Allende

1. Introduction. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende is the first novel that she published. The book became highly popular and the style of “magical realism” was used to describe the novel. Rogers (2002) explains that “magical realist writers write the ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary. The miraculous, on the other hand, is described with a precision that fits it into the ordinariness of daily life.” That is exactly what this novel does until gradually it cycles through about seventy five years of one family and ends in a place that is more real than magical. ...