The Door I Didn't Notice Opening: A Quick Exploration into Magical Realism

June 10, 2026

Today I stumbled, entirely by accident, upon a writers’ guild in San Francisco, the kind of door you don’t remember choosing to walk through, and joined their Writers’ Block sessions.

There was still time before the event began, so I struck up a conversation with the hostess and another writer named Miles, in from Brooklyn. Miles seemed like an interesting guy. He wore a pink Hawaiian shirt and a Hawaiian-looking pendant. Curly hair, an afro, and the countenance of the Buddha, untroubled, as if he had already finished every book he intended to read.

The hostess, Emily, was a graceful and vivacious young woman in her late twenties, with deep blue eyes, the blue of water that has a bottom you can’t see, and brown hair tied into a bun. A vivacious character, the sort whose presence rearranges a room.

The conversation meandered through our interests in different genres until it reached the bumpy territory of magical realism. I could see the spark in their eyes when they spoke of it, an actual spark, I think, though I let it pass as ordinary. Miles, who writes in the genre, began listing off books the moment I probed. Emily chipped in, explaining what the genre is about in an excited tone, and their enthusiasm was so infectious I felt I might catch it like a fever. It prompted me to dig deeper into magical realism during this block.

What it is: a mostly realistic world where impossible or supernatural events are treated as ordinary.

I kept circling the difference between fantasy and magical realism. Fantasy, think Harry Potter, runs on different laws of physics from our current universe, and those laws govern the political structure, the social hierarchy, the economy, the schools, the wars, everything. In One Piece, the world itself is other: devil fruits, fishmen, giants.

Magical realism is quieter. The strangeness slips into an otherwise recognizable world, and the narration doesn’t separate miracle from ordinary fact. There can be one supernatural perturbation or many; what matters is the attitude toward them. Nobody stops the story to explain the impossible or build a theory around it. The ghost is simply there, the plague arrives, the rain continues, and the village adjusts.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the obvious example. The insomnia plague makes no sense and is simply lived with. The ghost in the plot is treated almost like a neighbor. Impossible things happen, but the tone stays steady, and the miracle is never announced as a miracle.

Magical realism is also a way of telling history when history itself has become unbelievable. Colonialism, dictatorship, migration, partition, exile, state violence, family secrets: these things can already feel surreal to the people living inside them, and plain realism sometimes makes them too neat.

Growing up in India, this feels less foreign than I first assumed. The line between the ordinary and the supernatural was never as clean as the Western realist novel seems to want it to be. A grandmother could tell you a family story in which a god appeared in a dream, a dead relative gave a warning, a house had a presence, a curse followed a family, or an astrologer predicted something with disturbing accuracy, and the story would not necessarily be treated as fantasy. It would sit beside exam results, train delays, cricket scores, temple visits, power cuts, and family gossip. The supernatural was not always a separate genre. Sometimes it was just part of how people explained the pressure of life.

That may be why the genre makes intuitive sense to me. Magical realism does not always invent strangeness. Sometimes it simply refuses to edit out the strangeness already present in ordinary life.

Why authors use it: for emotional impact, and also for historical and political truth. A character’s grief might feel like the dead are physically present. A town’s collective shame might feel like bad weather that never ends. A migration story might become a story of black doors that open into other countries because, emotionally, migration does feel like that: one day you are in one world, the next day in another, and everyone expects you to behave as if this is normal.

It also feels close to oral tradition, the way a grandmother might tell a family story where a ghost appears, not as a special effect, but as part of the household record. The modern novel usually wants to keep fact, myth, memory, and superstition in separate rooms. Magical realism doesn’t bother.

Somewhere in the middle of all this it dawned on me that I had already read One Hundred Years of Solitude, years ago, without ever knowing it was magical realism. I had simply accepted the ghosts and the insomnia plague the way the people of Macondo did, which, I realize now, means the book worked on me exactly as intended.

Classics I still need to read:

• Gabriel García Márquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
• Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

Had Miles and Emily known me better, probably the books they would have pressed into my hands first:

• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: migrants step through black doors that open onto other countries, and the world simply adjusts. An immigration story told the way I have lived it, as something both ordinary and impossible.
• Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island: an Indian diaspora story where climate change, migration, and old Bengali legend bleed into each other. It sits exactly where I suspect the genre’s future lies.
• Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: half cyberpunk, half dream, all philosophy. Maybe not pure magical realism, but adjacent in the way dreams are adjacent to waking life.
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities: Marco Polo describing impossible cities to Kublai Khan, each one a thought experiment. Again, not exactly magical realism. More fabulist, more philosophical, more architectural. But still a book for anyone who spends his days trying to describe things that don’t exist yet, which is, more or less, the job description of a founder.

Movies they pressed on me, or that seem to live near the genre:

• Pan’s Labyrinth: probably closer to dark fantasy, but emotionally neighboring magical realism in the way childhood, fascism, myth, and terror bleed into one another.
• The Shape of Water: a fairy tale smuggled into a Cold War laboratory.
• Big Fish: a life mythologized until exaggeration becomes more truthful than fact.
• Birdman: ego, art, fame, and possible levitation, all held in a deliciously unstable balance.
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: ghosts and reincarnation appearing not as spectacle, but as presences that belong at dinner.

Contemporary writers. Names that came up in or near the genre: Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Ben Okri, Brenda Peynado, Amitav Ghosh, and many more.

Where the future might go: maybe magical realism will move toward AI, climate change, immigration, surveillance, algorithmic life, and the invisible systems that already govern us. The genre has always been good at showing the moment when reality becomes too strange for realism.

@misc{madur2026_magical_realism,
  author       = {Sai Sourabh Madur},
  title        = {The Door I Didn't Notice Opening: A Quick Exploration into Magical Realism},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://sourabhmadur.github.io/2026/magical-realism/}},
  publisher    = {sourabhmadur.github.io}
}