Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America makes a valuable contribution to a crowded area of research by approaching magical realism through affect studies, the history of the emotions, and new materialist studies (Jane Bennett, Bill Brown). Jerónimo Arellano’s opposing perspectives elicit surprising new insights about works that have been analyzed extensively, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps).Arellano identifies wonder as the key emotion in magical realism, which he then traces back to European chronicles of discovery and exploration of the New World. A new kind of “wonder discourse” (xix), unlike earlier medieval texts, placed the marvelous squarely within the realm of the unfamiliar empirical reality of the New World. Building on Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of the “marvelous ordinary” in Christopher Columbus’s diaries, Arellano’s revisionist account recalls “a colonial history of wonder” in travel accounts and chronicles by Columbus and his successors and in early modern cabinets of curiosity, or Wunderkammern. (Precursors of the modern museum that functioned as “microcosmic theater[s] of the world” [9], cabinets of curiosity displayed exotic objects from Europe’s expanding empires, including the New World.) Updating Carpentier’s marvelous, which is ontological, Arellano’s is the afterlife of this magical aspect of Latin American history and ordinary reality: “The rise of the wonder discourse of the chronicles of the New World overlaps with the emergence of the early modern ‘Wunderkammer sensibility,’ while the rebirth of the cabinet of wonder in modern art and culture coexists with the development of notions of lo real maravilloso americano [the marvelous real of the Americas] and magical realism in Latin American literature” (xix).Indeed, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America has critical ambitions that far surpass those of a new study on magical realism; it is more aptly characterized as a sketch toward a new transatlantic literary and cultural history of wonder in modernity from the discovery and invasion of the New World to the present. There are the seeds of a much bigger book here, and there is an analytic excess or remainder that leaves traces of various unrealized projects at the points where the study leaves the firm terrain of close reading and opens into theoretical explorations in affect theory, new materialisms, revisionist theories of modernity via the history of emotions, and so on. Overall, the sequence of chapters is well organized and effective in orchestrating fresh and intriguing transhistorical dialogues between colonial wonder discourses and the “afterlives” of wonder-related feelings in postcolonial magical-realist fiction. Part 1, “Wonder in the Colonial Heart,” begins with a theoretical chapter (“The Intermittence of the Marvelous”) that also offers “a microhistory of the cabinet of wonder” (xx) from the early modern rise of cabinets of curiosity, their dismantling in the mid-eighteenth century at the advent of Enlightenment rationality when their collections were dispersed and sent to new specialized modern museums, and their contemporary historical reconstruction and revival, including via alternative museums such as David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Chapters 2 (“Columbus’s First Journal and the Materiality of the Emotions”) and 3 (“Colonial Chronicles as Archives of Feeling”) shift from material culture to colonial chronicles. The third chapter discusses Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies, 1535–49) and Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 1578). The three chapters of part 2, “The Afterlives of Feelings,” then examine twentieth- and twenty-first-century magical-realist narrative in Carpentier, Marquez, and César Aira. The revisionist agenda of Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America has too many points of focus to account for in a brief review. In the limited space that remains, I address the most important ones. First, Arellano follows Jane Bennett in formulating a “‘counter-story’ to the reigning mythology of ‘the disenchantment’ . . . of modern Western culture” (xx). In keeping with his emotions-oriented critical lens, Arellano shifts away from seeing wonder as an “epistemic emotion,” which reduces wonder to an intermediate stage in the “master narrative of scientific progress” (15). Instead he proposes to “linger in [the] ‘chaotic energy’ of wonder” (15) staged in the cabinets of curiosity and evoked in the wonder chronicles. Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s punning concept, Arellano proposes moving away from conceiving the Wunderkammer as a “think tank” and instead recalls it “as a feel tank that structures the sociality of emotion” (18). The revival of the Wunderkammer sensibility and wonder discourse in twentieth-century magical realism suggests that the processes of modernity “create their own enchantments” (xx).A second focus is historiographical. Arellano develops a nonlinear and transhistorical account of wonder against the grain of “the teleological narrative . . . [of] the passage from cabinet of wonder to museum, and from a culture of wonder to the birth of a disenchanted modern consciousness” (15). His wayward history of wonder proceeds through cycles of rise and fall, its sixteenth-century effervescence, Enlightenment decline, twentieth-century revival, and post-boom exhaustion in the mode of magical-realist fiction. “The intermittence of the marvelous” (xix) affects both discursive (word-based) and material (object-based) instantiations. By recognizing postcolonial Latin American magical realism as a revival of colonial wonder and of the encyclopedic Wunderkammer sensibility, Arellano counters widespread critical claims about the exhaustion and death of magical realism in the post-boom era. Arellano’s perspective persuasively suggests that wonder is here to stay: while magical realism may indeed be an outdated expressive form, its vital and affective gist is sure to find new expressive outlets in the future. Thus the magician’s levitation of toothbrushes and other toiletries in Aira’s post-boom novel El mago is not an exhausted pastiche of the serious magic in Cien años de soledad but a reconfiguration of the marvelous via an aesthetic of cuteness (Sianne Ngai), while “never fully folding into disenchantment” (173). In this way Arellano overcomes dichotomies of enchantment versus disenchantment, such as Christopher Warnes’s distinction between Carpentier’s faith-based fiction that affirms premodern and non-Western outlooks and Jorge Luis Borges’s irreverent, skeptical fiction, closer to postmodernism, which employs the fantastic mainly to undermine the legitimacy of modern scientific rationalism (Warnes 2005, 2009).A third thread of revisionism concerns the methodological “interface” between the mostly nonintentionalist affect theory and the cultural history of the emotions (xxiv).1 In contrast to emotion, which is conscious, signifying, and cognitive, affect is viewed as preconscious, corporeal intensity, prior to meaning, cognition, and ideology. Arellano leverages the disconnect between ideology and affect that is the central article of faith of contemporary nonintentionalist affect theory toward a critique of the cognitive bias of the New Historicist reading of colonial wonder. To expose the ideology of colonial discourse in Columbus’s rhetoric of the marvelous New World, Arellano charges, Greenblatt and other critics, such as Rolena Adorno, displace considerations of affect to the margins of inquiry. In contrast, Arellano seeks to recover the affective intensity of the colonial wonder sensibility, which, he notes, Greenblatt was keenly aware of to begin with, when he diagnosed in the awed European subject of the colonial chronicle a “startle reflex” that European culture as a whole experienced in the “century of intense wonder” after 1492 (41). Arellano thus seeks to loosen the cognitive bent of wonder in the cultural history of modernity at the crucial turning point where wonder newly aligns with “mundane and worldly curiosity,” wonder’s so-called sister emotion (6). Arellano traces the neglected emotional dimensions of colonial wonder by “linking Columbus’s journal to the prehistory of the Wunderkammer” (43), a move that helps train his view on “emotional objects” (47) in Columbus’s first diary. Building on Philip Fisher’s observation that wonder has long been associated with “vivid” and ebullient objects (47), and borrowing Bennett’s notion of “vital materialism,” Arellano reads Columbus’s journal—and also Oviedo’s history—as engrossed in the “vibrant materiality” of an “array of marvelous objects” (75). Both texts are organized around “collecting gestures” of New World marvels (50). In a memorable observation, Arellano writes that Columbus’s text presents a registry of “the hands of Columbus and his men, suspended alongside the narrative, reaching toward the material world in order to gather objects for future display” (51). Impeccably researched in all areas of expertise, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America is a sophisticated study that models the kinds of innovative readings that new emotions-based and object-oriented theories may facilitate in Latin American literary and cultural studies.