 Precursors such as Domingo Sarmiento's "Facundo" (1845) were judged on how adequately they reflected reality.With its stylized magic realism, Asturias's broke from this realist paradigm—it is an avant-garde novel that laid the foundation for many other authors to develop what is now a broad and extensive genre.According to Latin American literary scholar Gerald Martin, Asturias's , which was written and published before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, uses a style now classified as the "new novel" or "new narrative".