magical realism story

Magical realism book review: Time After Time

, , , , , /

A magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond.

I bought Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald because it was listed on Amazon under Time Travel Romance. I’d say Amazon should invent a new category: Magical Realism Romance. This captivating love story, set in a meticulously detailed historic Grand Central Station, itself an otherworldly but actual setting, is in a class by itself. Nora and Joe live two decades apart. Following a train accident, Nora exists in a liminal realm, but they meet through a seasonal moment when dawn light strikes the station’s windows in the same way each year.
You don’t feel inclined to question the magical realism device because the characters are so fully alive. Watching them fall in love over the course of the story and figure out ways to inhabit their time-bounded meeting place is compelling and moving. Their love shimmers with the danger of Nora’s being unable to stay with Joe i his time and makes their time together poignant.

What is magical realism fiction? Read my posts here, and in this article (with a book list) on Hadley Mendelsohn’s My Domaine. This pithy definition of magical realism fiction seems just right to me: “Weaving elements of magic and fantasy into a realm that’s very much rooted in what we know to be real.”

Beautifully written fiction itself can become time travel, as this novel does. As a connoisseur of marvelous settings, I was fascinated by the historical and lovingly captured setting of New York City’s Grand Central Station. I once saw a documentary about its construction, an amazing feat like those of other grand public works in America. The author picked this as a perfectly magical setting. Bringing the characters to actually live within its many wonderful spaces and take advantage of its features, she creates a full and marvelous world.

The story asks a question similar to my magical realism, time travel novel The Renaissance Club: Would you give up everything, even the time in which you live, to be with your soul mate? A bittersweet ending truly satisfies, and though not the romance novel formula Happy-Ever-After, it’s uplifting. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

The Renaissance Club: “Enchanting, rich and romantic.”

The Time-Blossoming Birthday Cake – A Magical Realism Story, Part 2

, /

The Time-Blossoming Birthday Cake – Part 2

The magenta rosebud I picked off the rose-covered birthday cake given to me by Cousin George is now in full flower. The cake is still in the fridge. I’m afraid to cut a slice and eat it, because when I took this rosebud off and put it into a crystal vase, I found myself thrown back in time to the day before my birthday party. So now I can only watch the rosebud — now fully open — and keep checking the date on my phone like an obsessive maniac.

I’m not a believer in things like time travel or magical cakes. My feet are firmly planted in such realities as spreadsheets, To-Do lists, and my five senses. More

The Time-Blossoming Birthday Cake – A Magical Realism Story

, , , /

This is my account of the Time-Blossoming Birthday Cake.

It was given to me by a cousin I hadn’t met before. George St. James heard about my 30th birthday party from another cousin, Maria, who called to ask if she could bring our relative because he was visiting her in the city and she thought I’d enjoy meeting him.

George not only came with Maria, he brought me a gift — a small, beautiful cake covered in rosebuds. We already had three other cakes, so Cousin George suggested I save it for later. More

Magical Realism in Poetry & Pattiann Rogers’ Cat

, , /

What is magical realism in poetry? Possibly it’s defined by what isn’t magical realism in a poem. One might ask what is magical realism in fiction, but in poetry, in a poem, it’s what both is and isn’t. It’s the magical field created around ordinary images with ordinary language. The establishing of an entire field outside of, and at the same time, inside what we call reality.
A great example of a magical realism poem is Pattiann Rogers’ stupendous meditation, “Find the Cat in a Spring Field at Midnight.” It does everything but levitate the cat. Rogers makes the cat vanish and unvanish, Cheshire Cat style, without ever  leaving the reader outside a feeling of realism. She names “a peculiar vision” — and that definition for me is the essence of magical realism. It’s reality seen through a new lens, one that layers things together to achieve a clearer truth.

 

Finding the cat in a spring field at midnight

It takes a peculiar vision to be able to detect
Precisely where

The field grasses brushed by blowing
Stars and the odor of spring
In the breath of sweet clover buds
And the star-mingled calls of the toads
In the threading grasses and the paws
Of the clover brushing through the field
Of stars and the star-shaped crickets
In the ears of the sweet grasses
And the tail of the night flicking
Through the calls of the night and the spring
Stars slinking past the eyes of midnight
And the hour of the field mouse passing
Through the claws of the stars and the brushing
Haunches of the weeds and  starry grasses
Threading through the eyes of the mouse
And the buds of the stars calling
With the sweet breath of the field

End
And the cat begins.

— Pattiann Rogers

In “the star-mingled calls of the toads” the poem steps lightly out of the commonplace and never returns. “It takes a peculiar vision …” Indeed, it takes a visionary like Pattian Rogers. The magical realism in this poem isn’t found in metaphor, but in the transformations of one thing into another: