Question

“Lourdes, I’m back,” Jorge del Pino greets his daughter forty days after she buried him with his Panama hat, his cigars, and a bouquet of violets in a cemetery on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

His words are warm and close as a breath. Lourdes turns, expecting to find her father at her shoulder but she sees only the dusk settling on the tops of the oak trees, the pink tinge of sliding darkness.

“Don’t be afraid, mi hija. Just keep walking and I’ll explain,” Jorge del Pino tells his daughter.

The sunset flares behind a row of brownstones linking them as if by a flaming ribbon.

Which best identifies the magic realism found in the excerpt?
Lourdes’s father returning to her from the dead
the list of items Lourdes buried with her father
the dusk settling on the tops of the trees
the flaring sunset behind the brownstones

Answer 1

Lourdes’s father returning to her from the dead.

Answer 2

Lourdes’s father returning to her from the dead.

Step-by-step explanation:

Magic realism is a form of literary genre that dominates and originated mostly from the South American nations. This style of fictional writing deals with the themes of magic/unrealistic elements in the story infused alongside the realistic life of the characters and settings.

Christina Garcia's magic realist novel "Dreaming in Cuban" is one such novel where the ghost of Lourdes' father came back from the dead. This is just not possible in the real world, for ghost neither exist nor can they come back to the real world. Though the whole setting of the scene or even the story may have been possible real, with the setting being Cuba and the United States, the return of the dead father is not realistically possible. This itself is the magic realistic element in the excerpt.