credit: Jerry BauerJulio Cortázar (1914–1984): An Argentine novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer, Cortázar was born in Brussels. After moving permanently to France in 1951, he gradually gained recognition as one of this century’s major experimental writers. His works reflect the influence of French surrealism, psychoanalysis, and his love of both photography and jazz, along with a strong commitment to revolutionary Latin American politics.
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
A traffic jam outside Paris lasts for weeks. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro meet on a mountaintop during the Cuban Revolution. A flight attendant becomes obsessed with a small Greek island, resulting in a surreal encounter with death. In All Fires the Fire, Julio Cortázar (author of Hopscotch and the short story “Blow-Up”) creates his own mindscapes beyond space and time, where lives intersect for brief moments and situations break and refract. All Fires the Fire contains some of Julio Cortázar’s most beloved stories. It is a classic collection by “one of the world’s great writers” (Washington Post).
Translated by Katherine Silver
“I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist"—so begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. These classes are as much reflections on Cortázar’s own writing—“in my work I look for solutions as problems arise”—as musings about literature. He covers such topics as “the writer’s path” (“while my aesthetic world view made me admire writers like Borges, I was able to open my eyes to the language of street slang, lunfardo”) and the fantastic (“unbeknownst to me, the fantastic had become as acceptable, as possible and real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening”), Literature Class provides the amazingly warm and personal experience of sitting in a room with this fantastically inventive author. As Joaquin Marco stated in El Cultural, “exploring this course is to dive into Cortázar designing his own creations…. Essential for anyone reading or studying Cortázar, cronopio or not!”
Translated by Alfred MacAdam
Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón’s government), Final Exam is Julio Cortázar’s bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled.
In a surreal Buenos Aires, a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone’s bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a college called “The House,” meet up with their friends, and, instead of preparing for their final exam, wander the city, encountering strange happenings and pondering life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.
With its daring typography, shifts in rhythm, as well as wildly veering directions of thought and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness writing. Darkly funny—and riddled with unresolved ambiguities—Final Exam is one of Cortázar’s best works.
Author of Hopscotch and Blow-Up, Julio Cortázar’s (1914-1984) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer. He was born in Brussels, lived in Argentina, but moved permanently to France in 1951, where he became one of the twentieth century’s major experimental writers.
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called “City.” As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, “seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!” It is the setting where the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order are discarded and the reader is taken on a daring and exciting new experience of life itself, The New York Times described 62: A Model Kit as “deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.” Library Journal said 62: A Model Kit is “a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time.”
Long out of print and now reissued in paperback, Cronopios and Famas is one of the best-loved books by perhaps the greatest of Latin American novelists (author of Hopscotch and Blow Up and Other Stories). “The Instruction Manual,” the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. “Unusual Occupations,” the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator’s family, including the lodging of a tiger — just one tiger — “for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity.” Finally, the “Cronopios and Famas” section delightfully presents, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, “those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity — a hand of literary Marx Brothers.” As the Saturday Review remarked: “Each page of Cronopios and Famas sparkles with vivid satire that goes to the heart of human character and, in the best pieces, to the essence of the human condition.
In this playful and scintillating set of fabulist tales by Argentine master Cortázar, characters are shuffled through shifting realities. Cortázar fans will devour these affecting stories.
He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him.
I’m permanently indebted to the work of Cortázar.
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.
The noted Argentinian author’s incomparable elegance shines through these eight stories.
As Cortázar stresses throughout his talks, writing is rarely a pursuit of answers but, rather, about investigation—of the self, of one’s work, and of the world at large. The goal of the novel, Cortázar says, is to harmonize its formal and literal questions into a central, destabilizing quandary: ‘Why are things like they are and not otherwise?
[T]he lectures, at times, do feel cobbled together—but in the best way, in the way of art that thrives in complexity and contradiction. They are made from pieces of Cortázar’s life, his writing, his experiences as a young writer in Argentina and an as exile in Paris, his deep engagement with literature and cinema and politics, and they show the mind of a writer at work, asking questions and unearthing new possibilities.
Based on the words spoken by Cortázar and his students, the class that he taught appears to be an interesting hybrid of Cortázar as tour guide of his body of work, and as mentor into the broader lessons about the qualities of fiction that resonated most with him.
The consequent lectures—originally delivered in Spanish and translated adeptly by Katherine Silver—are erudite, intimate, charmingly fragmented, and anecdotal, covering a range of topics, from “Eroticism and Literature” to “The Realistic Short Story.”
He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him.
A first-class literary imagination.
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.
This book is a golden nettle.
I’m permanently indebted to the work of Cortázar.
Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder… and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.
Cortázar breaks open ready-made perceptions by submitting them to surreal perspectives.
