Shame employs a number of fantastical elements, but describes them in a straightforward and realistic manner. While certain characters have supernatural experiences (being turned into a mythical panther, becoming an angel) the narrative never adopts the tone of fairy tale, nor does it shy away from brutally realistic depictions of political violence. In this way, the novel fits comfortably within the genre of magical realism. Magical realism is a genre in which "magical" elements are depicted within the context of an everyday world. Some major figures within this movement include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Milan Kundera. These authors employed fantastical narrative elements to explore real-world issues.
One of Marquez's best-known works is One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel chronicles seven generations of the Buendia family, who reside in the fictional town of Macondo. The novel charts the ups and downs in the town, as each generation of the family seems to repeat the lives of the people who came before them. They suffer from various political regime changes and violent uprisings. They also bear witness to seemingly magical things like a factory that makes ice or a city made entirely of glass. At the novel's end, a couple has a child that is born with a pig's tail. In this novel, Marquez pioneered a style in which these elements are rendered with a plain straightforwardness.
Taking a different approach, author Italo Calvino embraced shorter vignettes in his book, Invisible Cities. The novel is written as a dialogue between the explorer Marco Polo and the king Kublai Khan. Marco Polo describes various imaginary cities to Kublai Khan, all of which may or may not exist. They are briefly depicted, usually defined in terms of some kind of single unifying concept like a shape or feeling. He writes of their emotional qualities as well as their physical appearances. The city descriptions are both specific while also remaining somewhat mysterious. Here, Calvino uses magical realism to craft images of cities that resonate with real places while also describing impossible settings.
Rushdie uses magical realism to a similar end as both Marquez and Calvino. In trying to capture something about Pakistan he sought to utilize fantastical moments in this novel. He seemed to feel that this mode would do his story more justice than either a straightforward realism or a fairy tale.
