Björn recenserade Os Malaquias av Andréa del Fuego
None
2 stjärnor
After their parents are killed in their sleep by a lightning strike, three siblings are split up. There's the guy who is taken in by the local boss and becomes a farmer - we're told - and later a coffee pot, for no particular reason. There's the guy who becomes a dwarf. There's the girl who gets taken in by an Arabic woman (who's a bitch, for no particular reason) and runs away to join her brothers but doesn't, for no particular reason. Also, there's the ghost of the local boss' mother, who latches on to the dwarf for no particular reason. Etc.
Whenever you introduce magic into your story - whether you call it magical realism or urban fantasy (rural fantasy in this case, I guess) or postmodern whatever - best case scenario, you get a mechanism for making tangible a lot of things that remain unspoken in real …
After their parents are killed in their sleep by a lightning strike, three siblings are split up. There's the guy who is taken in by the local boss and becomes a farmer - we're told - and later a coffee pot, for no particular reason. There's the guy who becomes a dwarf. There's the girl who gets taken in by an Arabic woman (who's a bitch, for no particular reason) and runs away to join her brothers but doesn't, for no particular reason. Also, there's the ghost of the local boss' mother, who latches on to the dwarf for no particular reason. Etc.
Whenever you introduce magic into your story - whether you call it magical realism or urban fantasy (rural fantasy in this case, I guess) or postmodern whatever - best case scenario, you get a mechanism for making tangible a lot of things that remain unspoken in real life; cause and effect, power structures, secret desires and fears, etc. Worst case, you get a story that looks like it's read Gabriel García Márquez without understanding why all these things happen, and where weird stuff just happens for no particular reason and the characters are just pushed around by the author's every whim.
Now, guess which end of the spectrum Os Malaquias falls on.