Dec 25, 2009

Magic Realism | Representative Works

Aura
Aura, a novella by Fuentes, was published in its original Spanish in 1962 and later translated into English in 1968. Narrated by a young scholar who has been hired by an elderly woman to write the memoirs of her husband, a deceased general, the novella reveals how the past and present are often interlocked and how time is fluid, rather than progressive, through the figure of Aura, who is a projected ghostlike image of the general’s widow at her most beautiful. In this novella, Fuentes’s use of the second person “you” is meant to pull the reader into...