Magic Realism: Difference between revisions

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* Michael Bishop's ''Brittle Innings'' is a coming-of-age story about a mute teenager who plays on a minor-league baseball team in the Deep South during World War II, when all the 'real' ball players are fighting the war. It's almost an incidental detail that the team's slugging first baseman is {{spoiler|Frankenstein}}.

* In ''[[The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To]]'', nobody knows why Eric can't sleep and doesn't have to (and very few people are even aware that's the case): most of the narrative attention is given to his and Darren's life as geeky high schoolers {{spoiler|until [[The Men in Black]] find out}}.

** Interestingly, there may actually be an explanation for it. [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Sleep/medical-mystery-boy-sleep/story?id=4828035#.TzR7ulyJfNI Rhett Lamb] almost never slept, and [http://thexodirectory.com/2008/03/hai-ngoc-sleepless-man-for-more-than-30/ Hai Ngoc] hasn't slept in thirty years. It looks like this can be caused by odd, rare medical conditions, though it's certainly fantastic.

** Interestingly, there may actually be an explanation for it. [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Sleep/medical-mystery-boy-sleep/story?id=4828035#.TzR7ulyJfNI Rhett Lamb] almost never slept, and [https://web.archive.org/web/20141226231502/http://thexodirectory.com/2008/03/hai-ngoc-sleepless-man-for-more-than-30 Hai Ngoc] hasn't slept in thirty years. It looks like this can be caused by odd, rare medical conditions, though it's certainly fantastic.

* Karen Tei Yamashita's ''Tropic of Orange'' proudly parades its magic realism and Gabriel García Márquez influence. Seven main characters in modern-day Los Angeles and Mexico's lives interweave in strange and not-very-satisfying ways when an orange causes a gigantic traffic accident, then firestorm on a major freeway. Meanwhile, another orange that happened to grow on the Tropic of Cancer (which was fertilized somehow by the woman who works on the property) causes the geography to shift completely when... well, it still doesn't make much sense, except there were lots of [[Author Tract|Author Tracts.]]

** Similarly, her novel ''Through the Arc of the Rainforest''. The plot revolves around a massive field of [[Green Rocks|plastic with seemingly magical properties]] being uncovered in the middle of [[The Amazon]], and the manner in which the main characters (including an American businessman with three arms, a Japanese railway conductor with a little ball floating in front of his face, and a Brazilian radio evangelist who thinks that the plastic is holy) interact with it.