Magical Realism and Older Age: García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) and Allende’s The Japanese Lover (2015)

Magical realism has become a powerful signifier to express the uniqueness of Latin American culture produced from the 1940s onward. Magical Realism is also considered a postcolonial instrument to fight back against the traditional realism of Western literature. Some of the major themes developed by Latin American magical realism writers are the relationships between Eros and Thanatos, past and present, and memory and reality. The fascination with death (and love) leads to the creation of a magical space in which older age is perceived by some as decadence and by others as one from which to explore other (imagined or not) realities. Aging, death, and love are central themes in almost all writings by Gabriel García Márquez and some by Isabel Allende. This chapter offers a comparative study of the last novel written by García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), and The Japanese Lover (2015) by Allende. From a feminist perspective on aging, this chapter analyzes the magical realism deployed by both writers in order to explore older age and love/sexuality, older age and gender, memory and temporality.