Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

When the Magical Become Real

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Apr-1990-Arca de Noe pier, Santa Cruz La Laguna

As an adult, my knowledge of Spanish was limited to, “Como esta usted, Sr. Mendez,” a line left over from a conversation from seventh grade. Several years ago I decided I wanted to be fluent in the language of the country south of my own.

When I began studying Spanish, one technique I used to build my vocabulary was to write a short story for children. The story centered on a community on a large lake surrounded by twelve villages, each named for a saint and for their position as if they were located on the face of a clock. The name of the lake was “Cuadrante” or “clockface” and the name of the village where the story takes place is Santa Maria de las Diez, or Saint Maria of the ten o’clock position. The characters are all named for birds, and often have bird-like features; e.g., one man has eyebrows like wings. The main character is a girl named Golondrina, the Spanish word for “swallow” (the bird). Golondrina is a magnificent fisher and helps to save her community after a good intentions result in a disaster for all the towns along the lake.

When my Spanish-proficient spouse read the story, the first thing he said was, “This sounds like Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.” Lake Atitlan, a large and very deep lake, is surrounded by towns with names like San Marcos, San Juan, San Pedro, and San Pablo—Saints Mark, John, Peter and Paul. I had never heard of the lake, much less been there. That in and of itself should have given me a clue that something else drove this simple narrative.

Eventually, my spouse and I travelled to Guatemala with a stop in Santa Cruz la Laguna, one of the villages on Lake Atitlan that is home to a well-known B&B at that time owned by a German couple and named for Noah’s Ark (Arca de Noe). After a wonderful night in a screened in room, lulled to sleep by the sounds of nature, we awoke to a tremendous view of this volcanic lake.

After breakfast, we stepped out on the dock and waited anxiously to be picked up by a launch that would take us to explore another of the villages across the lake. Alongside the dock, blue and white boats bobbed on the water, waiting to carry someone to another part of the lake. Before the launch came, I looked over at one of those boats attached to the dock, waves lapping at its side. The name of the boat painted in black: Golondrina.

Golondrina and the White Butterflies is available on Amazon.

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Magical Realism: The Magic and the Real

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Ava Feather for Blog

 

Remedios the Beauty represents purity while walking about the Buendía household without wearing a stitch of clothing. Remedios the Beauty, always oblivious to the men who lust after her. And in a magical moment, Remedios the Beauty, while hanging clothes on the line, is suddenly caught up in a brisk wind and ascends into the heavens.

After reading this passage, I was hooked.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and the best-known writer of what has come to be known as “magical realism,” created Remedios in his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The ascendance of Remedios is the ‘magic.’ The ‘real’ of Remedios may be a story of girls who actually disappeared. Those girls, unmarried and expecting babies, ended up in convents, out of sight of those who would judge them. For me, the breathtaking passage where Remedios ascends will always be bound up in the other story of girls made invisible by circumstances.

Isabel Allende combined ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ in her House of the Spirits—ghosts stand in for strong feelings. Salman Rushdie incorporated the dualistic real/magic in several of his books, and wrote about the concept of magical realism in an article in the New York Times Book Review shortly after Garcia Marquez’s death.

The term ‘magical realism’ is not without controvery—many Latin American writers feel pressured by some to write in Garcia Marquez’s style even as they reject it for their own writing.  Many of those who do don’t like the term; I’ve heard suggest ‘hyper-realism’ as a substitute.

It doesn’t matter to me what it’s called, I’m drawn to books that include the fantastical standing in for the real. I frequently insert fantastical elements into my own writing. In The Island of Lost Children, flying and mystery rivers and horses made of sea foam also represent something more profound.

Just recently I finished a lovely book, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton. From the very beginning the reader knows that Ava is born with wings, and the presence of wings keeps Ava trapped in her own home because of her mother’s fears for her. The ending is stunning. Through this book, I dipped my toes in a familiar yet alien universe. My review of the novel is here.

I have read many books considered magically realist, among them Beloved by Toni Morrison, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman—who often writes novels considered to be in the magical realism genre—is a book where the fantastical is only an illusion.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” So begins One Hundred Years of Solitude. The image of ice and its importance in the memory of a man facing the firing squad—those words and similar images made me return to the book not once but three times. I’m not sure the meaning of ice in the world of Macondo, but I’m certain it’s important in conveying something outside the most obvious thing.

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Magical Realism and The World of Ava Lavender

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Ava Lavender Book CoverWhile the mother of the narrator of The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender struggles in the throes of labor, crows collect cherry pits to toss at her house and sparrows snatch the strands of hair from women’s heads to weave into their nests. Ava’s birth affects all the birds on her street—the “auspiciously named Pinnacle Lane”—in unusual ways. We shouldn’t then be surprised that after the birth, an anonymous medical report reveals that baby Ava was born with “a slight physical abnormality.” We learn very early that the “abnormality” is the presence of two speckled wings that Ava wraps around herself from the beginning for protection and comfort.

The wings are avian or the wings are angelic, depending on the perspective of the observer. The presence of Ava’s wings become one among several reasons her mother, Viviane, insists that Ava never leave their house. Neither does her twin brother, Henry, who was born without them.

Sometimes there are feathers and sometimes the unfulfilled promise of flight. In the background are ghosts. Often there are tears. When Viviane loses the boy she grew up with, the boy who became the man she loved and the father of her twins, she loses a job at a bakery because “a batch of her eclairs made the customers cry so hard, the salt from their tears ruined a week’s worth of bread.”

The novel is above all a family saga, peppered with fantastical elements common to what’s come to be known as “magical realism.” The fantastical elements are what carried me through this narrative of Ava and her predecessors.  Even after death, her ancestors never leave; neither does one of the house’s former occupants. They simply hover in the background as spirits often do. About halfway through, I arrived at the place where I felt firmly rooted in this unusual house with this unusual family of both living and deceased members.

After finishing the book, I immediately started to miss living in Ava’s world and inhabiting the house on a hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane. Amidst so many welcome surprises is one horrific moment that is stunning. By the end the aftermath unfolds into something wonderful and liberating.

If I had one quibble, it would be that some of the minor characters—specifically Wilhelmina who rescues the family bakery—appear, play pivotal roles, then disappear for most of the rest of the book.

Otherwise The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is, as it’s named, a beautiful novel. It takes me to a world similar to all the ones revealed to me in my favorite novels. I may be tempted to return to it at least one time and I forward to reading more from the book’s author, Leslye Walton—hopefully more fiction that takes wings.

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Myths, Folklore and the Child who Melts into the Night

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Flying Girl copyBefore writing my book, The Island of Lost Children, several times I read the book that inspired it, Peter Pan. One of the sections in J.M. Barrie’s book that intrigued me most was Peter’s explanation of how the lost boys came to be:

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.”

I’m not a scholar who has examined the work in the context of its times. Still, I have a theory that Peter’s explanation is in response to conditions during a period when infant mortality was still quite high. This was a time when children died of all sorts of illnesses like influenza and diseases prevented by vaccinations which didn’t exist at the time. Barrie’s explanation of lost boys disappearing and being spirited to a magical land might have been a comfort as well as a simple explanation for curious children.

I wondered about how stories from folklore in other times and settings might have served the same function. In the folktales of many cultures, mythical creatures steal babies or young children and leave a sometimes deformed creature in its place. In Irish mythology, for example, faeries substitute a child with a changeling, a less than perfect version of the baby it replaces or even an old faery brought from the Otherworld of the sidhe to die on the human side.

After recently writing about the myths of Chiloe, a group of islands off the coast of Chile, I encountered the story of the invunche. The invunche is a first-born son fewer than nine days old who has been kidnapped or sold by his parents and who eventually ends up in the hands of witches or warlocks and guards their caves. The story is quite gruesome: one leg is broken and his foot attached to the back of his neck, and he’s fed on black cat’s milk, goats, and even human flesh. You know, what every parent wants for his or her son.

As disturbing as these stories are, I’m always fascinated about how the human mind conjures up explanations in the most creative ways. These tales in the oral traditions of the past, or in a popular book like Peter Pan, are testaments to our eternal search to try to understand. To convince ourselves that there’s some way to make sense of what may be incredibly difficult to accept.

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Chiloé

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Emerging in the early morning fog, a woman in a dress made of blue-green algae rises from the water off Chiloé. She steps on the shore, her skin perfumed by the sea, her golden hair churning like sea foam. She turns toward the waters from where she came, begins a ritual dance and combs through her hair. Her actions bless the sea life in the waters from which she emerged. The fishing that day will be bountiful.

If she had turned toward the shore, the catch would have been more meager.

The woman is La Pincoya, a Chilote—native to the archipelago of Chiloé—goddess of the sea. Some call her a sea sprite. Another of La Pincoya’s tasks is to transport with great tenderness those on the island who pass away. She carries them to the mystical ship the Caleuche where they begin a new life of eternal happiness.

To reach Chiloé, travelers can choose a 14-hour bus trip from Chile’s capital of Santiago, or take a less than two-hour flight from Santiago directly to Castro, a town located on the Grand Island of Chiloe, the largest in the archipelago. Another option is to fly to Puerto Montt, close to Chile’s lakes region, and drive to Pargua to a ferry that transports them and vehicle to Ancud, Chiloe’s northernmost city. Seals often accompany the ferry on its relatively short 30-minute voyage. Once in Chiloé visitors find brightly colored houses on stilts called palafitos, and in various location 16 wooden churches that are considered UNESCO world heritage sites. I saw images of the ship and other Chilote myths on the walls of a church there. The northernmost island is home to Chiloé National Park, an ecotourism site.

File0002 - CopyBecause of its uniqueness and how the mythical appears in unexpected ways throughout Chiloé, I have often thought of setting a novel there. In the novel, Chiloé is the place where a woman goes to start her life again four years after a tragedy that kept her from completing her doctoral dissertation about the island’s myths. She meets a man—Chilean but also an outsider to Chilote culture—who lost his younger brother in the country’s past political upheaval. Recently, the waters off Chiloe, a community dependent on fishing, were poisoned by a serious algae bloom that threatened its main source of income, its very survival. Sea life of all kinds washed ashore, poisoned by the algae. That tragedy also has a place in the narrative.

In this novel, I want to reflect on how people recover from tremendous loss and how mystery works in the background of their lives. Chiloe, with its myth and unique scenery seems the perfect location to explore the fragility of life. I have to admit that most of all, I want an excuse, though I don’t really need one, to return to a place that fascinated me from the first time I visited there more than a decade ago and one time since. I plan to go back next year. The novel is only one reason why.

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