Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family

by Anika Fajardo

Overview

A young woman from Minnesota searches out the Colombian father she’s never known in this powerful exploration of what family really means

 

He loved Colombia too much to leave it. The explanation from her Minnesotan mother was enough to satisfy a child’s curiosity about her missing father. But at twenty-one, Anika Fajardo wanted more. She wanted to know her father better and to know what kind of country could have such a hold on him. And so, in 1995, Fajardo boarded a plane and flew to Colombia to discover a birthplace that was foreign to her and a father who was a stranger. There she learns that sometimes, no matter how many pieces you find, fitting together a family history isn’t easy.

With her tentative entry into her father’s world, Fajardo steps on a path that will take her in surprising directions, toward unsuspected secrets about her family and herself. Set against the changing backdrops of Colombia and the American Midwest, her journey carries her back to the 1970s and the beginnings of her parents’ broken marriage, and forward to the present day, where the magic and reality of love and heartache—and her own experience as a parent—await her. The way is strewn with obstacles, physical and metaphysical—from the perils encountered on a mountain road in Colombia to the death of a loved one to the birth of her own child—but the toughest to negotiate are the shifting place of memory and truth while coming to understand her place in her family and in the world.

Vivid and heartfelt in the telling, Fajardo’s story is powerfully compelling in its bridging of time and place and in its moving depiction of self-transformation. Family, she comes to find, is where you find it and what you make of it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517912758
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	12/07/2021
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. Her writing has been published in the anthologies Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction and Sky Blue Water: Great Stories for Young Readers (Minnesota, 2016). She has earned awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Literary Center. The manuscript for Magical Realism for Non-Believers was a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Minneapolis.

Editorial Reviews

"Incredibly well written and compelling, Anika Fajardo’s Magical Realism for Non-Believers is a remarkable memoir about the search for a father, a culture, a self. I felt like I was reading about my own life and the price I paid for assimilation and acculturation. I simply couldn’t put it down." —Pablo Medina, author of The Island Kingdom and Cubop City Blues

"Bicultural experience is a dispassionate term for life lived across borders, identities, and even family trees. As Anika Fajardo makes clear in this searching and lyrical memoir, there is nothing dispassionate about flying back to one’s birthland, walking its soil again, or breaking bread with family who have become as good as strangers. Fajardo seeks to reconnect these missing and scattered pieces, and it is a privilege to journey beside her." —Lila Quintero Weaver, author of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

"A rare read, you know the kind: you don’t want it to end but you can’t put it down. Bewitching and beautiful, bound to move anyone who was ever a parent or a child, and just as compelling (and magical) the second time around." —Dinah Lenney, author of The Object Parade

"A forthright and sensitive tale of a daughter's quest." —Kirkus Reviews

"Fajardo revisits interactions and places with intricately remembered emotion, making for a delicious dive into the complicated, beautiful messes that love can make." —Booklist

"Fajardo describes the pain of yearning for something you can't quite articulate, of getting what you thought you wanted and finding it less than satisfying. She dives into her family's past and continues her story into her own adulthood, laying bare the many complicated ways our family informs who we are and how we interact with the world." —BuzzFeed

"Anika Fajardo’s beautifully written memoir is a full, satisfying read." —Star Tribune

"Anika Fajardo has written a wonderful, sensitive and compelling memoir about her journey to forge a relationship with the father she never knew. She uses her talents to spin a tale that could have been fiction but is all the more special because it is all true." —I Am Book Minded

"Magical Realism for Non-Believers is filled with honest and authentic truths about the complex relationship between children and their neglectful parents and the struggle to find one’s place between two cultures." —School Library Journal

"There is death, danger, cultural shock, love, loss, secrets and a growing family. It is about desperately wanting to know your roots, to find the missing pieces of yourself and to finally meet a parent who is like a phantom limb. It is the odd coincidences of parallel lives, the strange experience of coming to love strangers who are your blood, the peculiar curiosity of what ifs, the wonderment that another you could have easily come to fruition had life taken different turns." —Bookstalkerblog

"A natural storyteller, Fajardo writes in a way that is emotional and compelling, her memory so sharp that images spring from the page." —Mankato Free Press

 

From the Publisher

2019-01-13

A young woman crosses a cultural divide in search of her past.

In her debut memoir, Fajardo (The Dish on Food and Farming in Colonial America, 2017, etc.) recounts her emotional journey, at age 21, to find the father she had not seen since she was a young child. Born in Colombia, the author grew up in Minnesota; her American mother told her that her father, Renzo, loved his native country so much that he did not want to leave. The truth, Fajardo learned, was much more complicated, as were her feelings for the stranger with gray-flecked black hair and mustache, smelling of cigarette smoke and soap, who greeted her, accompanied by his young wife, when she landed in Colombia. Their reunion was awkward despite each being able to speak the other's language. Fajardo wanted not only to know Renzo, but to understand why her mother could not live with him—in short, "the complicated truth of these two people who brought me into the world, the events that had aligned to create the life I was living." She discovered more than her parents' apparent incompatibility. Her father was "overly emotional and fiercely closed off," she writes, "and my mother reacts to everyone's mood, switching back and forth between bliss and despair." Her mother felt alienated and isolated in Colombia, and Renzo felt the same when they returned to Minneapolis. Those differences proved unbridgeable, but there were other problems, as well, including her father's infidelity and, for the author, a shocking revelation. Fajardo strains to make connections between the events of her life and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. When it was published in the 1960s, she writes, "magical realism was part of the landscape, not a literary genre." However, this story, marked by disillusion, yearning, sadness, and one happy coincidence, does not draw upon or evoke magical realism; nor does Fajardo need García Márquez to justify or bolster her memoir.

A forthright and sensitive tale of a daughter's quest.

Kirkus Reviews