A marvelous collection of short stories -- but what makes them so is not easy to explain

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	• Blow-Up: And Other Stories Julio Cortazar Pantheon, 1985 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A fantastic intro to Cortazar

Cortazar was one of the more unearthly literary geniuses of the 20th century; like Borges and Nabokov I return to his short stories often (more than a decade after first discovering them), and can still get new things out of them.

I agree with previous reviewers - Cortazar's precision with language rivals Nabokov, Kafka, Proust or Borges. I would add another comparison as well - though the intent is quite different, the very musical and restless, rhythmic sensuality of the writing also recalls the best of Lawrence Ferlinghetti - both were fluent in and inspired by jazz culture, and Cortazar is confident enough in his expertise to be willing to explore and shape language with an engaged, fluent playfulness. This gave him a rare ability to create extraordinary and unforgettable worlds throught this (and other) collections.

This anthology is a great introduction to Cortazar, with many of my personal favorites: "Night Face Up," "Idol Of The Cyclades," "House Taken Over" and "Axolotl" are all unforgettable short fictions. I wouldn't stop there - Cortazar's other writing is well worth investigating (especially the second story collection, ALL FIRES THE FIRE). Cortazar seems to be sliding into unfortunate obscurity (in the English-speaking world, at least) as of late, with a number of key works currently out of print in translation. Thankfully, and for the time being, this is not one of them.

-David Alston

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An early version of La Maga

The other reviews here cover Cortazazr's work and talent so well that I'm only going to add something about one of the stories. If you're a fan of his novel Rayuela, or Hopscotch in English, the last story in this collection will be of particular interest to you. In "Secret Weapons," the main female character, Michele, is obviously an early prototype of the main female character in Rayuela: La Maga.

Michele is described as being "like a cat," and she's late for her appointment with Pierre (who is somewhat like Horacio Oliviera from Rayuela) because she's been wandering around the city looking into store windows. Quote from the story: "Michele can't be much longer, unless she gets lost or hangs around in the streets on the way, she has this extraordinary capacity to stop any place and take herself a trip through the small particular worlds of the shop windows. Afterward, she will tell him about: a stuffed bear that winds up, a Couperin record, a bronze chain with a blue stone, Stendhal's complete works, the summer fashions. Completely understandable reasons for arriving a bit late."

Cortazar doesn't develop this ability of Michele's into a deeper meaning, the way he does throughout Hopscotch, where La Maga's ability to become lost in the physical world intrigues and endears Horacio, who by contrast is so deep into his philosophies that he feels removed and lost from the world around him. But Michele and Pierre have a similar sexual interplay to La Maga and Horacio...in modern jargon it would be called sadism/masochism...but of course in Cortazar's descriptions it's something much more deeply felt and true than those words allow for.

Pierre isn't too much like Horacio...you could say they both smoke Gauloises, but pretty much every Cortazar character smokes them. But Pierre isn't so into philosophy and in fact he's blonde...that sounds superficial but it creeped me out to all of a sudden picture Horacio's doppleganger as blonde. I guess it's important to the story for him to be blonde. Anyway.

The characters Babette and Roland are here as well, straight from Rayuela. They're secondary characters in this story and not really developed at all, the way they are in the novel, but they're here nonetheless, a couple with the exact same names.

I of course loved this collection for all the reasons previous reviewers have mentioned. This story was an extra surprise at the end. It's really fascinating to see a writer explore a certain character in a short story and then expand the same character in a novel, to see how the character changes and how the writer's approach changes with the format.

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A marvelous collection of short stories -- but what makes them so is not easy to explain

This book was my first experience with reading Cortazar. From the first story on, the excitement of encountering a new (to me) brilliant writer went through me like an electric shock. The book injected an excitement and alertness into what otherwise might have been a sluggish weekend.

I have found, however, that explaining the basis of this excitement to others is not easy. It comes down to the difficulty of explaining what it is that makes great writers truly great -- an elusive insight.

Part of it is simple virtuosity; Cortazar possesses that which also distinguishes the writing of other greats such as Nabokov and Proust: that facility with language, the ability to find and to manipulate exactly the right words, to create a precise, vivid image, and to make music out of prose. (Note: I could perceive his virtuosity even though I read this book as an English translation.)

But it goes beyond virtuosity. If Cortazar wrote about ideas to which I was indifferent, the writing would not matter to me. But his stories inspire those flashes of recognition that make reading exciting; he creates those "aha" moments through his ability to present a feeling or situation that you recognize on some level, even if it's one that never previously made it out of your subconscious and which you might not have thought to remark upon, had not Cortazar dug it up for you.

From the general to the specific: This is a collection of short stories, most of which contain an element of the fantastic. Some of the flashes of recognition that I mention above are recognitions of mundane, daily feelings, but others are not. Cortazar seems to have ready access as well to our subconscious fears and to our dreams.

To take but a few cases in point:

One story involves a brother and sister who share a large, old wooden house, once owned by their great grandparents. At one point in the story, they hear voices and commotion from another part of the house. They bolt the doors, shut off that section, and confine themselves to living in the front part of the house. It's all left quite mysterious: Cortazar never explains who "they" are, who have taken over part of the house. But someting about this story rings eerily true; it's that bizarre combination of vivid, mundane reality, and unexplained phenomena, and illogical reactions to those phenomena, that characterize dreams.

Another example is a story in which a young girl goes to live with distant relatives in their country house for a summer. The house has a tiger roaming the rooms, but let's put that aside: what is remarkable about the story is Cortazar's ability to bring the scene to life, of an urbanite or suburbanite who is new to this comparatively relaxed environment. In one small, but typically rendered scene, the main character finds a bug crawling in an antiquated wash basin. She flicks at it, it curls into a ball, and she easily washes it down with running water. This is classic Cortazar; with a few well-chosen sentences, he puts you in that world: a world where the reader senses the sunlight through the house, the smell of pollen in the air, the renewed emphasis on the freshness of vegetables at the local market, and the ease with such inconveniences as older plumbing and intrusions by bugs are encountered.

Comparison with other writers is a bit unfair, because Cortazar has a voice all of his own. But in case it's helpful to you, Cortazar's precise prose reminded me a bit of Nabokov, his sense of wonder and magic recalled Steven Millhauser, and his trafficking in paradoxes a bit like Borges. But he's not quite like any of them: his prose focuses less than Borges on logical contradictions, and is more weighted toward precisely rendering sensory images.

Several of the stories are outstanding. My favorites (in addition to the two mentioned above: "House Taken Over", and "Bestiary") included:

Axolotls -- in which the narrator identifies very closely with an exotic amphibian species on his trips to the zoo.

A Yellow Flower -- an encounter with a sort of reincarnation gone awry

Continuity of Parks -- a very economical, very short story with an eerie, paradoxical twist

The Night Face Up -- a story in which reality and dreams are very difficult to distinguish

Cortazar is a master of the short story form. I would recommend him to anyone who likes the works of Borges, Millhauser, Nabokov, or Bruno Schulz.

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Literature at the Planck Scale

In this book are collected some of the most well-known short stories of the great Latin American writer, Julio Cortazar. Cortazar was a great experimental writer (his most famous novel, "Hopscotch", was a pre-cursor to future hyper-text novels) who drew his inspiration from French Symbolism, Surrealism and the improvisational nature of Free Jazz.

Fellow Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, once famously stated that there was no way of retelling the plot of a Cortazar story - he was absolutely right. The plot is minimal for many of the stories in this collection and in a sense, it is subsidiary. The `essence' of a Cortazar story is largely ineffable. Attempting to capture it in words leads one to fumble just the way that his characters do (see, for example, the short story "The Idol of the Cyclades" or "The Pursuer"). In Cortazar's fictions, reality and fantasy are separated by a permeable membrane and the proper way to read his writing is to experience it, to exercise to the fullest extent possible one's sense of empathy with the writing, in a sense, to merge with it. Indeed, this merging of the fantastic and real, of several viewpoints, is a recurring theme in this collection of short stories - it is most fully manifest in "Axolotl" wherein the young boy becomes obsessed with the axolotls to the point where he actually becomes one. However, the theme also recurs in "The Distances", "A Yellow Flower" and "The Continuity of Parks."

Many of the stories are a bit like the Taoist parable of Chuang Tzu who dreamed that he was a butterfly but upon waking was no longer sure whether he was a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. Cortazar's stories seem to exist in kind of quantum superposition states where both one and the other are simultaneously being realized -- this is literature at the Planck scale. Probably no other author has managed to capture, in writing, the feel of the uncanny as masterfully as Cortazar has. There is a sense of unease, half-hinted, that permeates through almost the entire collection. This barely expressible sense of a discordant note is especially evident in "The House Taken Over", "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris", "The Night Face Up" (a stand-out story which for me had some similarities to Borges' story, "The South"), "Bestiary", "Blow-up" (on which the Michelangelo Antonioni film was loosely based) and "Secret Weapons."

I suspect that I will be returning to many of these stories in the future as they seem to welcome repeated visits. Not all of the stories were of equal quality for me - some were less enjoyable than others. In discussing Cortazar as a novelist Borges once commented "He is trying so hard on every page to be original that it becomes a tiresome battle of wits, no?" To a certain extent, I felt the same way about some of the short stories in this collection, though quite possibly this is because I am not a sophisticated enough reader of post-modernist literature.

Overall however, reading the collection was an enjoyable experience which I recommend to other readers. Some of the stories are sure to persist in one's memory as beautifully strange, haunting experiences, inviting repeated visits.

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Amazing book, mediocre translation

Cortazar is one of the most amazing writers in Latin American literature. He is also almost completely unknown in the US. As far as this goes, then, this translation fills a huge gap; and one of this book's merits is that it makes Cortazar and his stories more widely known.
The translation itself, however, is subpar. You will certainly get the gist of the stories, and since a large part of Cortazar's stories hinge on the plot lines, you will definitely enjoy this book. However, just as much (in my opinion) of Cortazar's genius lies in his use of language as it does in his crazy imagination. And, I'm very sorry to say, this translation really doesn't do justice to him at all.
My recommendation, then: if you have never read Cortazar, this book will provide an excellent introduction to his works. Until a better translation is available, we must do with what we have: Cortazar is definitely worthwhile, no matter how much gets lost in the translation. Don't expect, however, full justice to be made to Cortazar's use of language. As is usual in these cases, the best way to read him is to tackle him in Spanish.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams...A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim...In the stories collected here -- including "Blow-Up;' on which Antonioni based his film -- Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible. This is the most brilliant and celebrated book of short stories by a master of the form.

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