In magical realism the world appears much like our own, but also
includes an element of the extraordinary. In Franz Kafka’s “The
Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has turned
into a giant insect. In Stacey Richter’s “The Cavemen in the Hedges,”
cavemen scurry in backyards, rummage through trash, and adore shiny
objects. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings,” Pelayo finds an angel with “huge buzzard wings, dirty and
half-plucked” in his courtyard after a rainstorm. Still, the
extraordinary is firmly rooted in the ordinary. “A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings” is populated with human characters, such as Pelayo’s
feverish newborn and the local priest, Father Gonzaga. And the story is
anchored in details the reader recognizes from her own reality: rain,
sea and sky, a chicken coop.
