Gabriel Garcia Marquez is best known for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. These works exemplify Marquez's signature literary style of magical realism, which he employed across his works. Some critics even consider Marquez the "father" of magical realism due to his unique writing style and interest in storytelling more generally.
Magical realism is a literary style that is in many ways difficult to describe, as it falls somewhere between surrealism and traditional narrative. That is, magical realism uses elements of the surreal, absurd, or even supernatural within a realistic narrative framework, rendering texts more mystical and raising questions about the creation of narrative and art more broadly. Love in the Time of Cholera, for example, features a cunning parrot with an acutely human sensibility. This concept is not altogether out of the question given parrots' ability to mimic human speech, but Marquez exaggerates the parrot's human qualities by bestowing on it a vague sense of human emotion. The parrot, then, represents an element of magical realism in the narrative.
In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," readers will glimpse Marquez's signature style in smaller ways. That the drowned man is so enormous and physically attractive is one element of magical realism (the men compare his weight to that of a horse). The collective thought process of the villagers is also an example of magical realism, as all of the villagers think the exact same things about the drowned man throughout the story. These details, though minor, place the story in a mildly surreal realm, allowing the author to pique the reader's interest in the concept of storytelling as an exaggeration of the aesthetics of everyday life.
