A History of Books

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A man and a woman, husband and wife, were standing in the main square of a town such as might have been depicted, fifty and more years ago, in one or another so-called article about one or another country in Central America in one or another issue of the National Geographic Magazine. The time was probably mid-afternoon, and the air was surely hot. The man and the woman debated several matters during their time in the square. Once, at least, the woman struck the man and was struck in return. None of the disputes between the man and the woman had been resolved when he and she became a male and a female jaguar, or it may have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard.

At some time during the 1970s, or it may have been earlier, the phrase magical realism became fashionable among the sorts of person who are paid to write comments on published works of fiction. Those persons mostly used the phrase when commenting on works of fiction by authors from the region known as Latin America. The persons seemed to believe that the authors mentioned had devised a new way of writing fiction. The authors themselves seemed mostly followers of fashion and ignorant. In their fiction, they reported things becoming other things or persons becoming other than persons as though such reports had not been included in works of fiction since so-called classical times. The phrase magical realism later fell out of fashion, and most of the works of fiction by the so-called magical realists seem nowadays forgotten.

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