Magical Realism

What a cool phrase, and what a really satisfying type of fiction. I just read One Hundred Years of Solitude and it was unbelievably baller, got me thinking about magical realism, all that good stuff. But that's not what our post is about today. Instead, I bring you a review of a more literary bent: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Rief Larsen, a damn fine book and well worth your time. Unfortunately, book reviews aren't as much my thing as movies, but I'm feeling adventurous and think I'll give it a shot. For those of you who like comparisons, think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but instead of an autistic eighteen-year-old explaining the world with little diagrams, we have a precocious twelve-year-old genius cartographer, T.S., whose maps greatly enhance what could be simply distilled to a coming-of-age story. Only it's a bit more complicated than that: T.S's coming of age is vastly more subtle than what we've become used to when we hear the phrase "coming of age;" the story is almost as much about his worldview as it is about his character coming to terms with events both within his family and the world of adults, who are attempting to recognize his genius with some grand Smithsonian prize. It's also a rousing tale of adventure with a heavy pseudo-magical tinge to it, which is where we get out post title: to me, magical realism isn't about the magic. It's that kind of story where things tend to happen in ways that don't fit in with our ordinary laws of how the world works, and often not with the laws of physics. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, this took the form of a house that was almost a living breathing character, minor miracles of a non-religious sort, longevity, and a general feeling of awe and amazement. In T.S. Spivet, the magical realism takes a form more akin to the active imagination of a very smart twelve-year-old boy, something that I found incredibly charming. And even the book starts to bog down with a story within a story i the middle (arguably the only weak point), the confluence of wonderful events in the end more than make up for any digressions sustained in the middle. This is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest books I have read by a recent author in my recent memory, which is why I review it so glowingly. Now go out there and experience some magical realism of your own, find it in your little life, and start peeping The Tartar Sauce more frequently, 'cause I got a posting there now for keeps. Over and out.