Mary C. M. Phillips

The best tribute to author, Gabriel García Márquez, at this year’s Academy Awards (other than being mentioned in the In Memoriam segment) was the big win for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film, Birdman. 

García Márquez’s beautiful, mythical, and mystical stories and González Iñárritu’s disturbing and dark film both fall into the genre of magical realism.

From Wikipedia: Magical realism, magic realism, or marvelous realism is literature, painting, and film that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, share in common magical or unreal elements that play a natural part in an otherwise realistic or mundane environment. Magical realism is the most commonly used of the three terms and refers to literature in particular. 

It’s an acquired taste and I’ve been happily immersed in the genre for several months reading books by both García Márquez and Haruki Murakami. I don’t know why I’m attracted to these stories of dysfunctional families, ghosts, and talking cats…but I am. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always believed in the miraculous and love how it’s conveyed through art.

I’ve only started querying my own novel, The Model Home, a story about love triumphing over greed and materialism. It falls into this lovely genre of magical realism and after last night’s win, I’m encouraged.

Birdman is dark. It plays with our emotions and shows human nature at its very worst. But that’s where the lessons are.  In the worst of times. I’m happy it won this year. It’s a great tribute to the author of the greatest Latin American novel ever written, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the entire genre of magical realism.

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“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

–  Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin