Walking the Wall

Years ago I read Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna and fell in love with her beautiful and lyrical style of writing and it became definitive to me for what magical realism is at its strongest. While arguing that there is a difference between fantasy and imagination, she defines imagination as the exaltation of reality–which in an of itself is a beautiful definition. She seems to be a bit at odds with her books being labeled as magical realism, though I’m not sure why. Regardless, she notes that the only element of it found in Daughter of Fortune, which I just finished, is the ghostly visitations of Tao’s wife Lin and she explains that it isn’t so much an element of fantasy but of another person’s reality:

In his culture, in the time that he lived, the idea of ghosts was ordinary, was completely real, so real that there were amulets in the houses so that spirits would not appear to you; there were streets where you couldn’t walk, etc. So in his culture, ghosts were perfectly possible. No American characters, for example, those who came to the Gold Rush in Daughter of Fortune, have any experiences of that sort because they live in a reality different from that of Tao Chi’en. What is reality? A combination of daily “reality” with a reality that is experienced in another manner?

This is a theme that runs through the book–the idea of cultural and even personal reality–and it is one I remember strongly from Eva Luna. She seems to work a lot with the idea that we all not only have personal stories, but are actively engaged in writing and rewriting our stories in ways that are often beautiful and strong–and sometimes in ways that are restricting and unhealthy. And really it goes a step further in that the stories we are writing and rewriting shape what reality is–so in a culture in which it is a shared reality that dead relations visit from beyond the grave, it comes about that ghosts truly exist on some level. Anyway, it is a beautifully written book and didn’t disappoint at all.