Isabel Allende, a Chilean author famous for many Latin American fiction works, incorporated magico realismo, or magic realism, into her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Magic realism is described as the interest of displaying a common or daily scene in a story, but implementing a strangeness or unnatural aspect or event. In order to stay within the framework of magico realismo, the author must maintain the fact that the characters in the story do not think of the strangeness or unnatural event as being unordinary. Let us begin with the history of magical realism.
             Although Isabel Allende began writing The House of the Spirits on January of 1981, the idea of magical realism came long before. Magical realism is believed to have been formed during the English expansion and colonization of new worlds. When Europeans began to travel to new lands, they encountered new cultures. Since the rituals and daily lives of the newly exposed cultures were not the same as what the English were used to, they conceived strange interpretations and explanations as to why things were the way they were. These new notions often included stories about spirits, forces of nature, and the supernatural. These ideas and stories quickly spread and mystified Latin Americans, Scandinavians, Africans, Indians, and cultures all over the world. Many of today's major authors from Latin America use magical realism in their stories. When the term first reach the shores of the United States, it was used to describe arts and some pieces of literature. The first man be!
             lieved to utter the words "magic realism" was a German critic by the name of Franz Roh, in 1925.# He used the term to characterize a group of Post-Expressionist painters. In the 1920's, Alejo Carpentier, a French author, ventured upon magical realism when he decided to distance himself from the Surrealist movement in Europe. He settled in Latin America and noticed...