In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm's length away. "Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house."

Basic set-up:

This passage describes the return of the gypsies, who come every year to the village of Macondo, bringing extraordinary new inventions with them.

Márquez's novel is full of magical things, but it's also full of pretty ordinary, day-to-day things that we readers of the novel are all familiar with. Here the gypsies introduce the Macondo villagers to a telescope. The telescope may seem like a mundane thing now, but it's treated like something magical here. Are we right, or are the gypsies right? After all, being able to actually see other planets in detail is a pretty magical thing, if you think about it.

While this passage is all about the mundane, we also see Márquez turning the mundane into the magical. The Macondo villagers, unlike us, have never seen a telescope before. So while a telescope is familiar to us, it isn't to them. And because it's new, it seems magical. Who knew you could look at someone standing on the other side of the village through a magnifying glass and see them as if they were standing an arm's length away from you?

Describing ordinary things as if they were extraordinary is another stylistic hallmark of Magic Realist texts. The mundane becomes magical, and the magical becomes familiar. The Macondo villagers are amazed by the telescope, and the gypsy Melquíades tells them, "Science has eliminated distance." He also says, "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house."

Nowadays, of course, we totally can do all of that: we just need to switch on the television or log on to the internet to see what's happening in any place in the world. This is a regular part of everyday life for most of us today, but to the villagers in this novel, who live in a tiny place in the middle of nowhere, this seems extraordinary.