Imagination Is the Bond in an Upside-Down World : Books: The Latin American style of ‘magic realism’ mirrors a world where the incredible is real and reality surreal.

“Magic realism” is one of the greatest and most influential literary movements of the 20th Century. Its exponents, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, have done more than bring an indigenous Latin American style to the attention and acclaim of the rest of the world; their use of magic realism also has served to explain Latin America to the world.

In Latin American fiction and cinema, people vanish or materialize, communities that have remained unchanged for millennia are altered abruptly and inexplicably. Land crabs flood houses, an old man grows wings, a beautiful woman goes out to hang up laundry and is swept away by the wind, tangled in her clean, white sheets.

Such transformations are perfectly credible in the context of Latin American existence. People disappear, places are carried away by change, children are born in antiquity and wander unprepared into the Space Age.

I have a Central American friend. The stories she tells do not ring true to the North American ear. Sometimes she says she is 23 years old, sometimes 25. Sometimes she insists she has no brothers, only sisters. Sometimes she admits that her brother is a guerrilla in the mountains. Sometimes she tells tales of terrible danger and suffering. The next day she cannot face those memories and denies them.

North Americans assume she is lying. She is not. Her reality differs from North American reality. She does not know her age because she cannot read her birth certificate. She rejects her brother because his very existence presents unimaginable dangers. She denies her suffering because it is the only way she can survive another day. Her real life is devised in the style of magic realism.

Undoubtedly, much of the impact of magic realism stems from the grim aspects of Latin American reality. In “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” Garcia Marquez narrates the tale of a murder everyone knew would happen. They knew when it would happen, and where, but they did not stop it.

But magic realism can be gentle and mystical as well as chilling. The magical side of this realism has been felt by anyone who has entered the rain forest at dawn, by anyone who has walked alone through the mist in search of dry firewood. By anyone who has paddled an old dugout canoe through a downpour, or spent months in the mountains tending livestock, or pulled the weeds from a corn field hour after hour, day after day, season after season.

Think about camping. Now you have an idea what it feels like to live in rural Latin America. Comforts are lacking, but the mystery of nature is pervasive. You cannot escape from yourself or your surroundings. You are afraid of wild animals and strangers. You believe your own ghost stories.

Garcia Marquez has explained that his work resembles wild imagination only because Caribbean reality itself is like the wildest imagination.

My mother was born and raised in a small city on the south coast of Cuba. The tales she tells are strange to North Americans, so she rarely shares them: A man who lived in a cave and sacrificed children. A spinster who stole the plaster Infant Jesus from the arms of St. Anthony’s statue and refused to give it back until the saint found her a husband. Fifteen-year-old girls married off to 60-year-old men. Parrots on the roof echoing the voices below. People dancing until they fall into a trance. One uncle struck down by lightning, another taken away by the secret police. A prison in the dungeon of an old Spanish castle. The leg of a dog chewed off by a moray eel. Families divided by war. Paradise lost.

“There are no boundaries between reality and dreams,” wrote Miguel Angel Asturias, the great Guatemalan author whose books, such as “Men of Maize,” give equal credence to ancient Maya myths and contemporary political conflicts. “The magic of our climate and light,” Asturias wrote, “gives our stories a double aspect--from one side they seem dreams, from the other, they are realities.”

When Garcia Marquez accepted the Nobel prize, he credited Latin American reality as the source of creativity: “All of us creatures of that unbridled reality have had little to ask from imagination because our biggest challenge has been the lack of conventional resources to render our lives credible.”

Those who experience the incredible write accordingly, and what results is the world’s most wonderful literature.