While this week’s reading was not as inscrutable as last week’s poetry could be (especially in translation), its surreal quality made it almost as difficult to draw conclusions from. When I first started this, I mentioned that the only impression I had of Latin American literature was magical realism. This week’s text definitely fulfilled that expectation, with each story containing a dreamlike atmosphere that emphasizes the non-reality of the written word.

I obviously do not have the writing space to discuss every short story in the collection as each one has quite a lot worth dissecting. I will point out a few highlights for me from the collection, as I was doing research about the text these seem to be some of the most popular for most people. “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” a short story with one of the more literal labyrinths than those found throughout the text, explores how time branches off into a million different equally possible realities. The story reminded me a lot of an old sci-fi story similar to The Twilight Zone or something like that. The notebook that Dr. Yu Tsun finds reveals the future and raises a lot of poignant existential questions about free will and fate. The presence of the future notebook also brought up (what I thought were) very contemporary discourses concerning the precise nature of time. As knowledge of future events creates a paradoxical awareness of what is to come and impending time loops, Borges fundamentally questions the shape and linearity of time as it actually is instead of just how we experience it. These concepts such as time loops, rewriting the past, and a lack of free will all strike me as very modern science fiction tropes, so I was very surprised when I learned that ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths” was originally published in 1941. As this time period was arguably the cusp of 20th-century modernity, I wonder how many science fiction writers found inspiration in texts that employed magical realism to the effect that Borges did here.

Another highlight from the collection for me was “The Library of Babel” as it contained another unique setting that seemed straight out of science fiction. This story kind of resembles “The Garden with the Forking Paths,” as it also contains an object, in this case, a library, that holds the vastest and most unknowable quantity of something. In this case that something is information instead of time. The very scale of the library dwarfs the character’s attempts to ascribe it with coherent meaning. This enormity of information emphasizes the limitations of human knowledge and humbles people for even attempting to try to understand it.

Question: Do you enjoy magical realism? What is it about this genre that connects it so closely with “lesser” genres like fantasy or sci-fi but at the same time is always associated with literary merit?