Macondo vs. McOndo: goodbye to South American magic realism?

Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian author who has won the National Book Award in his native country, is scheduled to lecture in Alberquerque, New Mexico, US, on the "McOndo Movement," a twelve-year-old literary style in hispanic literature that contrasts the more common magical realist style by being more firmly rooted in the gritty, modern, real world.

Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet coined the term McOndo. "My own world," he wrote, "is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' ? a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes, and condos." In 1996 Fuguet co-edited (with Sergio Gómez) the anthology "McOndo," whose title combined McDonalds with Macondo, the fictional town created by Nobel Prize writer Gabriel García Márquez in his famed classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Interest in McOndo writing has grown ever since.

Despite the popularity of surrealist works by Juan Rulfo, García Márquez, and Borges, Paz Soldán insists that McOndo writing is a literary mindset that can be embraced by today's readers.