More Magical Realism

Until I read OHYoS, I had never read any literary works of magical realism. Well, it’s much bigger than Gabriel García Márquez and even great writers like himself (especially great writers like himself) run into annoying cases of writer’s block. Turns out Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1961), another great work of magical realism, was a “life-changing discovery” for Márquez and served as one of the author’s inspirations. Rulfo’s novel introduces a man named Juan Preciado, who wants to fulfill a promise he made to his recently deceased mother and travels to her hometown of Comala - an actual ghost town - to find his father, Pedro Páramo. Rulfo’s and Márquez’s novels contain many similarities in terms of politics, Latin American history, and setting. Márquez based Macondo off his hometown of Aracataca, which dwindled to a figurative ghost town (not the same ghost town as Comala but still) after the banana company left. Some critics argue that Pedro Páramo is either a work of magical realism or the forerunner to subsequent works of the same genre (it would still be magical realism? like what?) and at first I was frustrated because (for some reason) I thought these were implications that Pedro Páramo did not necessarily fall in line with great works such as OHYoS but then I was like, Rulfo’s novel was practically Márquez’s favorite book and Jorge Luis Borges (another magical realism writer) “considered Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language”. Whatever genre Pedro Páramo falls under, many thought the novel was a literary masterpiece and it’s cool that a renowned writer like Márquez drew inspiration from another renowned writer I didn’t know anything about.