Magic Realism

In the early 1930s Jorge Luís Borges seems to have completed a translation into Spanish of the short fiction of Franz Kafka. Out of this experience, according to Joan Mellen, grew the idiosyncratic “exercises in narrative prose” that were collected as Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), now widely regarded as a landmark in twentieth‐century literature. Many years later Borges would tell an interviewer that he found in Kafka (and in Henry James) “the sense of … things being meaningless, of living in a meaningless universe”.

Ms Mellen discusses the effect of Kafka on Borges and Gabriel García Márquez in...