Magic Realism at the Service of Ethnicity: Darrell Kastin’s Azorean Honeymoon in The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales

Abstract

This essay attempts to contribute to the ongoing critical discussion on the short story-cycle and its tradition within the framework of emergent contemporary American literatures, more specifically American writings with a Portuguese ethnic resonance. The collection of stories which will be the basis for discussion in the ensuing pages is Darrell Kastin’s The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales, published in 2012.
This genre was conveniently appropriated by Latin-American writers and, more recently, has thrived with the emergence of postcolonialism, diasporic studies, multiethnic literatures, and hybridity. In the case of Darrell Kastin, an American writer of Portuguese and Russian descent, he finds in ethnicity, strangeness, folklore, tales, exoticism, and upholding his Azorean ethnic roots as rhetorical, fictional outlets to write mostly about the Azores and, sporadically, its diaspora in California. In this volume, he draws from his Azorean/Portuguese heritage when visiting his mother’s and grandmother’s country of birth and, in the process, crafts stories replete with mysteries, strangeness, myths, and folk tales he has heard about there and blends these with traits akin to magic realist writings.