Tags
Book review., Books, French Literature, Gabriel García Márquez, Le Livre des Nuits de Sylvie Germain, Literary criticism, Magic Realism, One Thousand and One Nights, Postmodernism, Sylvie Germain, The Book of Nights by Sylvie Germain
The sterility of magic realism. Everywhere within Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Nights one is met with the sterility of magic realism. If this book had been published in 1966, a year before the appearance of One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, then it would be celebrated today as a tremendous literary event. Instead, however, it was published in 1984.
The problem is not just that this is a derivative book, which steals from Márquez rather like when some old lady takes a cutting of a wondrous, exotic plant in a botanical garden and then tries to replicate its effect back at home. Germain transplants her snippet of Márquez to rural France, where it takes root up in the north-east and near the Meuse river. Here, her Péniel family eke out their own “one hundred years.” As in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Péniels’ century is one of suffering, with their story trundling through the devastating German invasions of 1871, 1914 and 1945. Yet the bigger crisis that swoops down within this book is that Márquez’s magic realism is revealed to have no staying power. When deployed by Germain, it suddenly looks frail and haggard, less than twenty years after it had seemed so cool and fresh.
I am unsure whether magic realism is a genre, a literary movement or merely just a particular method that any writer can potentially use. Whatever it is, it is generally regarded as having flowered from the postmodern literature of Latin America and in the work of major writers such as Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Of course, it had not come out of nowhere. The European Surrealists of the 1930s and the writing of the German novelist Günter Grass during the 1950s can be readily identified as precursors. It pays to be relaxed when it comes to categorising magic realism, since the more that one looks about for it in previous literary history the more of it one will find.
The Book of Nights has been clearly shaped by the influence of the medieval Arab short-story anthology The One Thousand and One Nights. Or rather its “magic” has, since The One Thousand and One Nights is totally submerged in magic and it gets by without snatching even a breath of realism. The brittleness of the narrative and the woodenness of the characters within The Book of Nights are recognisably arabesque, and they will recall Robert Louis Stevenson’s picture of The One Thousand and One Nights in which, “no human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggermen.” Germain’s account of the trenches and the Holocaust, on the other hand, drive her magic on towards realism.
In The Book of Nights, there is actually little magic and even less realism. A bad bargain is struck and both sides are swindled. If Germain was sincerely committed to the magic then The Book of Nights would be a children’s book, with its quirky fairytale details such as its necklace made of tears and its friendly wolf. If she was committed to the realism then The Book of Nights would be unbearable, with a story in which we could empathise with the terrible suffering of realistic characters. But in bringing up the Holocaust, there is too much pain for it to be ever a children’s book. In draping itself in magic, it is too frivolous to ever succeed as realism. A book that is ostensibly rich with magic and replete with realism thus annuls itself and it becomes strangely sterile on the page.
In its fairytale motif of twins The Book of Nights grows perhaps the most sterile. When one of two twin brothers is killed in the trenches, the aghast survivor can no longer remember which one he is. He assumes both identities and his family and mistresses try to act as if both of them are still somehow inhabiting his single personhood. If this storyline had been written up realistically, following some dense research into the genuine experiences of twins, then it would be mesmerising. But all of the psychology of the drama is skipped over and most readers are probably left with a wistful sense of “what might have been.”
Books such as The Book of Nights confirm that magic realism was never really in it for the long term. To put it simply, they show that magic realism does not work as a literary method. I do not know how much of the freshness of Márquez’s masterpiece was really just novelty. Today, we tend to view One Hundred Years of Solitude with nostalgia rather than as a force that can live out a practical life within literature. Today, the predominant feeling to be engendered by magic realism might be annoyance. It is implicated in the flatness of rambling, unsatisfactory novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), which are today the stumpy ruins of magic realism’s civilisation. The tone of these books is synthetic, artificial, lightweight and sterile, a literature with no honest blood in it. The sterility of magic realism.
Tychy 
The phrase ‘magic realism’ never meant much to me. Nor did ‘post modern’. I think that labels of this sort are the creation of critics rather than novelists/story writers. The first time I entered a university book shop I noticed that critical books took up much more shelf space than the the works they referred to. Visually speaking, the parasites were overwhelming the body. Then I heard a professor of literature saying that students should be on top of changes in critical thought over the last fifty years. He didn’t say why. Terminal tedium.
God, how I agree with you. Since the early 1990’s, in fact, I cannot find a graduate program in literature that teaches literature, and so, rather than suffer through a graduate program in theory, I’m a substitute preschool teacher. Raised a close reader, I always believed that, if you could closely read a work of literary art (rather than a text), it would begin to show you just how it wants to be read. I’ve sat in on a few graduate seminars for one or two meetings to discover no one opens the book to delve deeply into the words on the page anymore.