“The Famished Road” Booker Prize-winning novel by Ben Okri (2): Quote on cover calls it “Something approaching a masterpiece of magic realism”

The novel opens with remarks that are suggestive, not of magic realism, but of multiple personality:

“Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives at once…Often, by night or day, voices spoke to me. I came to realize that they were the voices of my spirit companions” (1, p. 7).

And I have reason to doubt that “magic realism,” the literary technique of using magical thinking in a realistic context (3), is a valid concept, because Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a writer who was supposedly a major exponent of magic realism, said it was merely the kind of subjective experience that he was prone to have. He insisted on…

“…the direct relation between his own novels and his own life: ‘There’s not a line in any of my books which I can’t connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to a concrete reality.’ This is why he has always asserted that far from being a ‘magical realist,’ he is just a ‘poor notary’ who copies down what is placed on his desk” (4, p. 153).

So I expect that Ben Okri’s The Famished Road will have what looks like a literary technique (magic realism). But will it be a literary technique that he is using, or an imaginative kind of thinking that he is prone to have? I will see.

1. Ben Okri. The Famished Road. New York, Anchor/Doubleday, 1992.

2. Wikipedia.“Ben Okri.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Okri

3.Wikipedia. “Magic Realism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism

4. Gerald Martin. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.