Let’s start:- marquez and magical realism
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
MARQUEZ AND MAGICAL REALISM
A
When Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, he was mourned around the world, as readers recalled his 1967 novel, One hundred years of solitude, which has sold more than 25 million copies, and led to Márquez ‘s receipt of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.
B
Born in 1927, in a small town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast called Aracataca, Márquez was immersed in Spanish, black, and indigenous cultures. In such remote places, religion, myth, and superstition hold sway over logic and reason or perhaps operate as parallel belief systems. Certainly, the ghost stories told by his grandmother affected the young Gabriel profoundly, and a pivotal character in his 1967 epic is indeed a ghost.
Márquez’s family was not wealthy: there were twelve children, and his father worked as a postal clerk, a telegraph operator, and an occasional pharmacist. Márquez spent much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents, which may account for the main character in One hundred years of solitude resembling his maternal grandfather. Although Márquez left Aracataca aged eight, the town and its inhabitants never seemed to leave him, and suffuse his fiction.
C
One hundred years of solitude was the fourth of fifteen novels, but Márquez was an equally passionate and prolific journalist.
In Bogota, during his twenties and thirties, Márquez experienced La Violencia, a period of great political and social upheaval, when around 300,000 Colombians were killed. Certainly, life was never safe for journalists, and after writing an article on corruption in the Colombian navy in 1955, Márquez was forced to flee to Europe. Incidentally, in Paris, he discovered that European culture was not richer than his own, and he was disappointed by Europeans who were patronising towards Latin Americans. On return to the southern hemisphere, Márquez wrote for Venezuelan newspapers and the Cuban press agency.
D
In terms of politics, Márquez was leftwing. In Chile, he campaigned against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet; in Venezuela, he financed a political party; and, in Nicaragua, he defended revolutionaries. He considered Fidel Castro, the President of Cuba, as a dear friend. Since the US was hostile towards Castro’s communist regime, which Márquez supported, the writer was banned from visiting the US until invited by President Clinton in 1995. The novels of Márquez are imbued with his politics, but this does not prevent readers from enjoying a good yarn.
E
Márquez maintained that in Latin America so much that is real would seem fantastic elsewhere, while so much that is magical seems real. He was an exponent of a genre known as Magical Realism.
‘If you can explain it,’ said the Mexican critic, Luis Leal, ‘then it’s not Magical Realism.’ This demonstrates the difficulty of determining what the genre encompasses and which writers belong to it.
The term Magical Realism is usually applied to literature, but its first use was probably in 1925 when a German art critic reviewed paintings similar to those of Surrealism.
Many critics define Magical Realism by what it is not. Realism describes lives that could be real; Magical Realism uses the detail and the tone of a realist work but includes the magical as though it were real. The ghosts in One hundred years of solitude and in the American Toni Morison’s Beloved are presented by their narrators as normal, so readers accept them unhesitatingly. Likewise, a character can live for 200 years in a Magical Realist novel. Surrealism explores dream states and psychological experiences; Magical Realism does not. Science Fiction describes a new or an imagined world, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but Magical Realism depicts the real world. Nor is Magical Realism fantasy, like Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which an ordinary man awakens to find he has transformed into a cockroach. This is because the writer and the reader of that story cannot decide whether to ascribe natural or supernatural causes to the event. In contrast, in a work by Márquez, the world is both natural and supernatural, both rational and irrational, and this binary nature fascinates readers.
Magical Realism does share some common ground with post-modernism since the acts of writing and breading are self-reflexive. A narrative may not be linear, but may double back on itself, or be discontinuous, and the notion of character is more illusive than in other genres.
Naturally, some of these elements disturb a reader although the enormous success of One hundred years of solitude and the hundreds of other Magical Realist works from authors as far apart as Norway, Nigeria, and New Zealand would seem to belie it.
F
Latin America has had a long history of conquest, revolution, and dictatorship; of hunger, poverty, and chaos, yet, at the same time, is endowed with rich cultures, with warm, emotional people, many of whom, like Márquez, remain optimistically utopian. Gabriel Garcia Márquez has passed away, but his fiction will certainly endure.
Questions 1-7
Passage 1 has six sections, A-F.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
NB: You may use any letter more than once.
1 Márquez ‘s background
2 how Márquez felt about Europe
3 influences on Márquez
4 the extent of Márquez ‘s fame
5 why the US did not welcome Márquez
6 what constitutes a Magical Realist work
7 other writing important to Márquez
Questions 8-13
Complete the summary below using the dates or words, A-L, below.
Write the correct letter, A-L, in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.
| A accept | B adapting | C adopting |
| D believes | E fantasy | F non-linear |
| G novel | H rational | I supernatural |
| J use | K 1925 | L 1927 |
What is Magical Realism?
The genre of Márquez ‘s fiction is known as Magical Realism, a term first applied to a painting in 8………………… Magical Realism is often described in negative terms, as not being Realism, Surrealism, Science Fiction, or 9…………………
In a Magical Realist novel, the world people live in – which is the real world – is described in detail, but magical or 10……………….. elements intrude. These are treated like real ones so that a reader 11……………….. them. For instance, characters live longer than natural lives, and ghosts exist. Time, in a Magical Realist work, may also be 12…………………
Despite requiring a suspension of disbelief by readers, Magical Realism has enjoyed great success, with writers from all over the world 13……………….. the style.
Answers:-Marquez and magical realism
Passage 1
1. B
2. C
3. B
4. A
5. D
6. E
7. C
8. K
9. E
10. I
11. D
12. F
13. C
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