Associated with modern South American writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, magic realism has also been identified in a number of European (Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera) and Asian novelists (Salman Rushdie). It involves the displacement of history and a universal sense of the fantastic, presented as a commonplace. Márquez speaks of the crushing effects of linear time, and of fantasy not as an invention but a condition. It also represents the modern novel in a state of imaginative play — Professor Malcolm Bradbury