48 pages • 1 hour read
Jane SmileyPerestroika In Paris
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Magical Realism
Magical realism is a subgenre of fiction that is set in the real world and incorporates magical or fairy-tale elements into a narrative that is otherwise a realist depiction of everyday life. Magical realism thus explores the boundaries between the real and unreal and the role of the creative imagination for both writers and readers.
Magic realism draws on past fictional traditions such as religious, mythological, and fairytale narratives, written before the secularization and scientific rationalism of Western society. It also draws on an ancient surviving tradition of non-Western literature, which has tended to maintain a greater mixture of “real” and “magical” elements in contemporary literary culture.
In a modern, Western context, magic realism is a deliberate method to highlight the constructed and imaginative nature of a narrative and to extend the reader’s suspension of disbelief into the magical realm. Its purpose is very often allegorical (i.e., presenting a parallel representation of reality). Many critics consider the modern form of magical realism to have developed in Latin American culture, originating with Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 collection of short stories Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Iniquity). Recent key examples of magical realist books include Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young (2022), The Night Circus (2011) and The Starless Sea (2019) by Erin Morgenstern, and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (2017).
Though magical realism is a nebulous genre, its allegorical nature makes it closely allied with social commentary. By blending magic into the accepted fabric of the natural world, authors can draw attention to an element of injustice or philosophical question, presenting a magical solution or alternative approach. Some authors, like Toni Morrison, use magical realism to make the past come alive, forcing the characters and by extension, readers, to face past events that they might otherwise choose not to engage with.
Authorial Context: Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley is an American novelist who was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1949. She earned a B. A. in Literature from Vassar College in 1971. A few years later, she returned to higher education at the University of Iowa, earning two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. Following her doctorate, she became a Professor of Literature at Iowa State University from 1981 to 1996, before pursuing writing as her full-time career. She has published 12 novels, the most well-known of which is her 1991 novel A Thousand Acres. She also has published three nonfiction works, which include a Charles Dickens biography and a personal memoir of her experiences as a racehorse owner. Smiley brings her knowledge of racehorses, literature, and culture to her 2022 novel Perestroika in Paris.
As a lifelong learner and teacher, Smiley’s literature conveys a natural curiosity and appreciation for the broader world around her. Her novels have been written in different genres as an authorial experiment in style and form. She instills this quality into her characters, who receive endings that reward the level to which they perceive the wonders they experience in their journey. As Smiley’s foray into magic realism, Perestroika in Paris portrays a world in which talking animals are unsurprising, and in which typically aggressive species of animals coexist peacefully. Through Perestroika in Paris, Smiley encourages readers to approach life with curiosity and an acceptance of what and of what can be. Because the novel has no antagonist, Smiley creates a world that prioritizes positive forces and cooperation.
Smiley received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992, the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature in 2006, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. She is a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.
