The world has seen a lot of changes since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" hit the literary firmament in 1970. Back then the English reader first tasted a never-never land, a fantastic place called Macondo where children levitated, peasants convened with ghosts and leaders never died. It was an effervescent image of Latin America that was clearly unseen or unheard earlier. It was a Latin America that influenced writers, charged the critics and had millions of readers spellbound. It was also the way the world imagined Latin America to be.

But as the old adage goes, all things must pass, even magical realism. At least that's what the Chilean author Alberto Fuget believes. Thanks to Fuget and his clan, after nearly three decades a new Latino voice is taking the literary world by storm and challenging the realm of magical realism. It is street savvy, realistic and unashamedly downtown - smartly called McOndo, a clever spoof on Marquez's village. According to Fuget, McOndo is a blend of Macintosh, McDonald's and Condos.

The McOndonians believe that Latin America is no paradise. Life's secrets are revealed far more splendidly in shantytowns and old coffee cups than in iridescent butterflies. The mundane is never marvelous here. It is stark, insipid and irreverent. The mood is highly hallucinatory, the stories painted on a somber canvas of urban life that reeks of drugs, sex, money, music and death.

The McOndonians burst into the scene in 1996, when a host of 18 writers, all under the age of 35, published a collection of short stories titled "McOndo". The literary establishment's reaction was nothing short of derisive contempt. The Kamikaze eyes of the critics found the stories shallow and flippant. Most of them considered these young writers as a gang of rich, spoiled, quasi-intellectuals addicted to drugs, sex and the steamy pop culture of Latin America.

Nonetheless, Fuget and his clan were excited over the galactic maelstrom that McOndo stirred up. In the words of Paz Soldan, a Bolivian McOndo author, "The worlds depicted in McOndo novels are closer to the Latin American experience than is Garcia Marquez's world." McOndo, in a true sense, simply unveiled the changing demographic of Latin America. The environment that the Latinos lived in was crowded, polluted, full of sham rather than the dreamy, salubrious world that magical realism portrayed.

Today, McOndomania has spread into streams outside literature. It has invaded pop music in the form of Mexican rap that New Age kids devour. Even some films produced in Mexico are purely McOndonian in spirit. The imagery in these films reflects the landscape described in the preface to McOndo: "big... crowded, polluted, with highways, and subways, cable TV... five-star hotels built with laundered money."

All said, it's not as if the McOndo clan despises the followers of magical realism. Paz Soldan reinforces, "We love Gabo. We just don't want to imitate him." A new form of expression is all that they promulgate. Then again, it's not quite sure today whether McOndo will attain the global recognition that magical realism enjoyed. Rewind to Latin America fifty years ago, when a new boom of writers emerged in the same manner, narrating tales of the New World. Prominent among them were Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes. But the one who created history was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was translated into English, he became the most prominent voice of that immensely gifted group

Since then, Marquez has sold millions of copies read in over three dozen languages, and has found a permanent place among the goliaths of literature. But the other writers from that boom are either dead or have given up the genre and the new ones lack the vision of the old. And that has resulted in the rising downfall of magical realism.

Most of the McOndo writers sell briskly in their local languages yet find it hard to get their work translated across their borders. But the storm is brewing. It won't be long before the whole world is drenched in the McOndo spirit. If Fuget's prognosis is right, magical realism may soon be a thing of the past, as passé as the image of Juan Valdez and his mule in the Colombian coffee fields.

 

P.C. Muralidharan is an Indian working in Madras, India as an advertising copywriter for Mudra DDB, one of the premier advertising agencies in the country.