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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Christina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban, recently published by Alfred

A. Knopf.

It's a first novel, and Christina lives here in Los Angeles, so it's a pleasure to have

you on the show.

Thank you.

I wanted to start by talking about the inevitable subject of magic realism.

You know, I was talking the other day, I think it was to call us Fuentes, and I had said

that in a way, Garcia-Marquez had just shown a flashlight on an area of literature that already existed,

that Bruno Schulton, to some extent Kafka, had all written a kind of magical realism.

And yet this dream lyricism seems really to typify South American and Caribbean literature. Why do you suppose that is?

I'm not sure. I think it would be easy to say that it emanates from the landscape and from familial relations

and from the syncretism between so many cultures and religions, in particular in Cuba,

between the Afro-African and Yoruban tradition and the quite Baroque and fanciful Catholic tradition.

And I think that the swirl and mix of it all just inevitably lends itself to flights of fancy.

...