 In the Prologue to the novel, Carpentier defines the phenomenon of "lo real maravilloso", which has been considered one of the starting points for the genre of magic realism.Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias are considered "pioneers of the contemporary Spanish-American novel" because of their mythologizing of the Latin American experience.Their work in between the late 1940s and early 1960s led to the Latin American Boom, one of whose main features was the use of magic realism.