I am very happy to share my thoughts about the ‘surrealism’ and ‘magical realism’ that you will find in my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal.

When you surf the internet or google for information you discover that the term ‘surrealism’ is mainly associated with the visual arts, i.e. paintings. You’ll find pictures of landscapes that are dream-like, abstract representations of real landscapes, often loaded with metaphor and symbolic allusion.

Similarly, LOVE LIES: A Journal weaves this surreal and symbolic quality into its narrative fabric. We look with fascination at the inner landscape of one man. What we see, however, is not a static, tableau-like landscape captured in a surrealist painting, but the living, ever changing landscapes of an evolving spirit. LOVE LIES is a journey from the outer man to the inner man – a gradual shifting away of our attention from the outer form, or perceived reality, to an inner plane of seeing and knowing, a higher level of consciousness.

Not unlike a surrealist painter, I as a novelist have created a series of surreal pictures, though not in paint but quickened by the free flow of words – pictures that follow one another like a fast moving storyboard, taking André, the protagonist, through surreal inner landscapes. When one looks at a Dali painting, at first sight it looks like a landscape, but on closer inspection watches are melted over rocks and the telephone is a lobster. In the same way, André, when he looks at life up close, finds there are a lot of melted watches and lobsters.

The characters in André’s world, whether real or surreal, are actually aspects of his own being. The fact that they all have a life of their own on the outer plane of existence symbolises André’s fragmentation. This also applies to his surreal characters. They are recognisable externalisations of his mind, appearing to him as ‘real’ people in his field of awareness.

Discovering the separate parts of his inner plane is André’s journey. Through a slow process of integration, the ‘inner man’ becomes whole, changing the ‘outer man’ from a mere shadow into a ‘character of substance’. In this sense, André’s quest is an analogy. All the characters in the novel, including him, refer to aspects of our own being.

I believe we are all born with a pinch of ‘ordinary madness’ but spend our whole lives suppressing it. André, on the other hand, explores his ‘ordinary madness’, because his normal life has fallen apart and he has nowhere else to go. André’s ‘ordinary madness’ is useful to him, because through it he finds his own way back home to himself.

It could be argued that magical realism rather than surrealism is the soul of LOVE LIES: A Journal. The novel is about André’s journey into his own marvellous, real darkness and, initially, objects and people occur that do not conform to a daily reality.

André’s ordinary life is invaded by things too strange to believe, the mirror, his dreams, bringing a magical quality to his experiences and giving his life a dimension of the mysterious, the unfathomable, as well as a hint of unexplored, dangerous territories, where only the brave dare go.

But there comes a point in the novel where everything in André’s experience is strange to him. At that point he is living in a surreal world. However, I have to point out that the technique of alienation (Verfremdung) of say Kafka’s ‘surrealism’ is different from the ‘surrealism’ in LOVE LIES, which is to challenge André’s perception of ‘reality’.