Only Partially Moving on from Magical Realism

Dan Green on The Future Is Not Ours:

If there is disappointment in reading The Future Is Not Ours, it is disappointment in its relative lack of aesthetic diversity. On the one hand, it is gratifying to see Latin American writers moving on from magical realism (without necessarily dismissing its achievement), but there is more departure from the “magical” side of this once provocative pairing than from “realism.” Stories such as “Lima, Peru” and “Pillage” use the methods of realism very skillfully (in these cases, something like the “slice-of-life” strategy), but there is little suggestion from this book that the way forward from magical realism might involve formal innovation, or at least some re-appraisal of the role of storytelling in fiction. Paz does point out the greater willingness of these writers to include elements of genre fiction, but while this might make Latin American fiction potentially more attractive to a wider international audience, it doesn’t really encourage fresh approaches to narrative practice, since if anything genre fiction tends to rely even more reflexively on conventional modes of storytelling than mainstream literary fiction.

Arguably this aesthetic conservatism is an unavoidable function of the shared worldview evinced in the book’s title. Writers of formally or stylistically adventurous fiction implicitly think there is a future—at least for literature—and it belongs to them and to all other writers attempting to replenish the resources of literature with freshly conceived strategies, techniques, tropes. One would not begrudge the writers in The Future Is Not Ours their pessimism, of course, which provides an underlying perspective that makes many of the stories here so emotionally bracing.

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