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Blow-Up and Other Stories
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 fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.
Axolotl
House taken over
Distances
Idol of the Cyclades
Letter to a young lady in Paris
Yellow flower
Continuity of parks
Night face up
Bestiary
Gates of heaven
Blow-up
End of the game
At your service
Pursuer
Secret weapons.
Axolotl
House taken over
Distances
Idol of the Cyclades
Letter to a young lady in Paris
Yellow flower
Continuity of parks
Night face up
Bestiary
Gates of heaven
Blow-up
End of the game
At your service
Pursuer
Secret weapons.
277 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Julio Cortázar
686 books6,722 followersJulio Cortázar, born Julio Florencio Cortázar Descotte, was an Argentine author of novels and short stories. He influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers from Mexico to Argentina, and most of his best-known work was written in France, where he established himself in 1951.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 479 reviews
April 26, 2021
Julio Cortázar’s stories are like the tales told by voices in the head… And the characters in them are like shadows…
The young protagonist admired axolotls so much that finally he turned into an axolotl, at least mentally.
House Taken Over is a ghostly tale about two – male and female – recluses without a place in the sun… Or are they ghosts?
The Distances is a crazy diary of a girl… “Your soul is a chosen landscape…” as Paul Verlaine said.
The Idol of the Cyclades is a mystical horror comedy.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris is something like the extravagant confessions of a lunatic.
Continuity of Parks reads like a miraculous tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.
Bestiary is the most enigmatic and highly imaginative story, which is open to many possible and impossible interpretations…
A little girl Isabel is sent to the country estate of the Funes family to spend there the summer. And somewhere in the house there is a tiger in hiding…
And I may suggest my very simplistic interpretation as well…
Bestiary is a symbol of the world… Rema symbolizes an origin of good… Kid – an origin of evil… Isabel stands for innocence… And tiger is a retribution…
Eventually the origin of evil is trapped and is devoured by the tiger.
Blow-Up, which in original is titled something like The Devil’s Drooling, is a story of a failed temptation… An amateur photographer inadvertently disrupts the machinations of the devil by just taking a photograph.
The Gates of Heaven is a mockingly romantic tale of a revenant…
At Your Service is a dark funereal satire about the pretensions of high society.
The Pursuer is about the demons pursuing artistic personality and ruining musician’s mind… Or probably it is musician who pursues the demons and makes them slave for him.
The world is a vast place where anything may happen… And what doesn’t happen can be dreamt.
It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility.
The young protagonist admired axolotls so much that finally he turned into an axolotl, at least mentally.
House Taken Over is a ghostly tale about two – male and female – recluses without a place in the sun… Or are they ghosts?
The Distances is a crazy diary of a girl… “Your soul is a chosen landscape…” as Paul Verlaine said.
The Idol of the Cyclades is a mystical horror comedy.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris is something like the extravagant confessions of a lunatic.
Continuity of Parks reads like a miraculous tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.
Bestiary is the most enigmatic and highly imaginative story, which is open to many possible and impossible interpretations…
A little girl Isabel is sent to the country estate of the Funes family to spend there the summer. And somewhere in the house there is a tiger in hiding…
Before dropping off to sleep, when faces appear in the darkness, she remembered again the Kid going out onto the porch for a smoke, thin, humming to himself, saw Rema who was bringing him out coffee and he made a mistake taking the cup so clumsily that he caught Rema’s fingers while trying to get the cup, Isabel had seen from the dining room Rema pulling her hand back and the Kid was barely able to keep the cup from falling and laughed at the tangle.
And I may suggest my very simplistic interpretation as well…
Bestiary is a symbol of the world… Rema symbolizes an origin of good… Kid – an origin of evil… Isabel stands for innocence… And tiger is a retribution…
Eventually the origin of evil is trapped and is devoured by the tiger.
Blow-Up, which in original is titled something like The Devil’s Drooling, is a story of a failed temptation… An amateur photographer inadvertently disrupts the machinations of the devil by just taking a photograph.
The Gates of Heaven is a mockingly romantic tale of a revenant…
It seems right for me to say here that I come to this dance hall to see the monsters, I know of no other place where you get so many of them at one time. They heave into sight around eleven in the evening, coming down from obscure sections of the city, deliberate and sure, by ones and by twos, the women almost dwarves and very dark, the guys like Javanese or Indians from the north bound into tight black suits or suits with checks, the hard hair painfully plastered down, little drops of brilliantine catching blue and pink reflections, the women with enormously high hairdos which make them look even more like dwarves, tough, laborious hairdos of the sort that let you know there’s nothing left but weariness and pride.
At Your Service is a dark funereal satire about the pretensions of high society.
The Pursuer is about the demons pursuing artistic personality and ruining musician’s mind… Or probably it is musician who pursues the demons and makes them slave for him.
The world is a vast place where anything may happen… And what doesn’t happen can be dreamt.
June 21, 2022
2/20/21 Update after I had a dream last night of Julio Cortázar writing in his Paris apartment.
Oh, Julio, if I could just have a moment to talk to you. You are up here in your heavenly jazz tree, on a higher branch then where I'm sitting, laughing at the sadness of the world stuck in its own grass and mortar rather than taking a ride in the whirlwind of imagination, reading Blow-Up, Axolotl, House Taken Over, Continuity of Parks, End of the Game and the other stories in this little book of yours. You play the divine trumpet, buzzing your lips on the horn of plenty, the jazz of words, improvising, taking a look inside, your fantasy being the fun stuff, exciting, the way you take a certain vision, say the room in a house, and come up with a story where the room is taken over by a mysterious presence.
If the man in another story, like Blow-Up, starts saying funny, nonsensical things, then you simply ball up his talking and throw it against your imagination and the story slides into its rightful place. Up here in the tree with your trumpet, no branch is too high for you to climb to pick the fruit of words, a word on each leaf, some pretty exotic fruit up here in your jazz tree.
Suddenly, I hear a voice down below asking: “What is Julio Cortázar doing up in that jazzword tree?”
I freeze, look down at the two men on the ground. “Now that’s really odd,” continues the man, “I thought he was dead . . . and now he’s up in that tree playing his trumpet.”
The other man says, “Let’s get Billy and his friend to cut the tree down with their two-man saw.”
I shout at them: “Please don’t have Billy and his friend cut down this tree – Julio won’t do you any harm.”
“Unless Julio plays his trumpet and all his words start shaking things up,” comes the reply.
I’m trying to figure it all out. I thought you were dead anyway, Julio, but as you always said, that’s only one part of the story. Maybe you are more than dead and came out the other side. If anyone could pull it off, it would be you, around the block and back again, around the day in eighty worlds.
I shout down at the men, “No need to call Billy and his friend. I can recommend Blow-Up and Other Stories, and let Julio go back to playing his trumpet.”
February 1, 2019
قصص قصيرة متوسطة المستوى يختلط فيها الواقع بالخيال في مزيج غير متجانس أحياناً، ويغلب عليها المبالغة في الوصف والاستطراد في تفاصيل فرعية كثيرة لا تخدم الحبكة الرئيسية.. بشكل عام لا أحب تلك النوعية من القصص القصيرة المليئة بالتفاصيل، فالقصة القصيرة تعتمد على التكثيف لا الإطالة .. لم تعجبني سوى قصة "استمرارية الحدائق" وإن كا�� عنوانها غريب وغير معبر
January 1, 2017
The author has made Axolotls alive like beings who are conscious of their existence; as if they can steer their lives at their 'will'.
As if they can define it, which only a conscious being can do.
"They were lying in wait of something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of axolotls."
The central theme of the story is existential angst about no inherent meaning of life and still existing authentically by defining your life and then taking responsibility to live accordingly.
As I progressed through the story it remind me of 'The Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka, which is a seminal work in existentialist literature.
The 'House Taken Over' follows the same existential theme; protagonist feels angst over losing his abode.
"They've taken over our section", Irene said. The knitting has reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappeared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.
"Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly.
"No, nothing."
The story moves like a game with a definite plan. However it lacks the depth the other story- 'Axolotl' has but it makes existential themes, explored in 'Axolotl', more discernible.
Cortazar- Certainly a literary master !!
As if they can define it, which only a conscious being can do.
"They were lying in wait of something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of axolotls."
The central theme of the story is existential angst about no inherent meaning of life and still existing authentically by defining your life and then taking responsibility to live accordingly.
As I progressed through the story it remind me of 'The Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka, which is a seminal work in existentialist literature.
The 'House Taken Over' follows the same existential theme; protagonist feels angst over losing his abode.
"They've taken over our section", Irene said. The knitting has reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappeared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.
"Did you have time to bring anything?' I asked hopelessly.
"No, nothing."
The story moves like a game with a definite plan. However it lacks the depth the other story- 'Axolotl' has but it makes existential themes, explored in 'Axolotl', more discernible.
Cortazar- Certainly a literary master !!
April 26, 2021
Now I am an axolotl!
After spending some quality time in the company of Julio Cortazar and his choice short prose, I believe I can more easily identify with the weirdness, wonder and mystery of existence, as seen though the ‘lens’ of his imagination. I may not be sure which side of the glass wall I am standing right now and what exactly I am looking at, but I recognize that reality/ realism is not providing all the answers I need, and that sometimes we need a tiger roaming around the house for his own reasons ( Bestiary) , other times fluffy rabbits pop out of our mouths ( Letter to a Young Lady in Paris), an entire life can be told in a minute and a half of a jazz tune ( The Pursuer ) and axolotls know better than us what the meaning of life is:
It’s that we don’t enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped – we barely move in any direction and we’re hitting one of the others with our tail or our head – difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it’s less if we stay quietly.
I have come across the name often enough in references to influential modern writers and ‘best of’ lists of South American writers, I have even seen the Antonioni movie a couple of times without clicking on to the source material, but this is my first read of Cortazar stories. The hype is in his case entirely justified, at least as far as I am concerned. He is a master stylist, a poet that playfully yet carefully constructs his phrases (I wish I could be able to read in the original Spanish, or at least in the French he adopted in his later career). The main attraction is not the prose itself, so much as the masterful capture of things usually left unsaid, of the inner labyrinths of the psyche where logic and science must take second place to the fears of the subconscious. His stories are more metaphor than mirror of the world, and almost all of them provide an unusual angle, a skewed point of view that is meant to push us out of the comfort zone and challenge us to consider said world and our fellow humans from a new perspective, like that of a tiny invertebrate:
Or it was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.
I don’t think the stories included in the present collection have been written in a planned manner, as one of those interlinked episodes that together form a whole novel, yet I got an impression of consistency and continuity from the ensemble, of an unique voice that may put on different masks, yet remains true to its inner self and remains troubled by the same questions of identity, loneliness, limited means of communication and art as a sublimation of life.
Axolotl opens the book, just like my review, with an invitation to consider that as we are looking at the world, the world is looking back at us. We are maybe haunted by our lizard brains who remember a time we lived in primeval swamps waiting for our minds to develop higher powers of reasoning.
House Taken Over is almost a horror story, the tale of a brother and sister living alone in a big mansion somewhere in Argentina, spending their entire lives cloistered inside, one of them reading books, the other knitting useless knick-knacks. ( We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.) Slowly, inexorably, mysterious and invisible visitors/ burglars/ strangers are pushing them out of the nest, room by room, until the whole house is locked out and the duo is left destitute on the streets. I think the metaphor here is the way we waste our best years in inconsequential pursuits, denying the slow draining of the sand from the hourglass.
The Distances is another haunting story, this time the hunting of a young woman’s dreams, instead of a house. Alina Reyes has trouble falling asleep, and when she does she experiences the life of a woman thousands of miles away, in Budapest. The theme of confused identity and soul changing will be reiterated in other stories in the collection, almost always with an unexpected ending and a provocation to make sense of events that defy logic and common sense. See as examples The Idol of the Cyclades where an archaeological team discovers and ancient fertility statue, and later in Paris they get involved in a dangerous love triangle that may be provoked by the memories stored in the ancient stone; or A Yellow Flower where a middle aged man thinks he has discovered his doppelganger in a young boy he sees on the street, doomed to repeat the same life he has lived through once already; or The Night Face Up where a young man has a bike accident and the trauma flips his brain into reliving the emotions of an Aztec prisoner being prepared for ritual slaughter. A couple of quotes from these stories highlight the concept of deja-vu, of repeated histories and subconscious memory:
... the coming and going gestures of his hands which also seemed to want to glue pieces of air, putting together a transparent vase, his hands pointed out the statuette, obliging Morand to look once more against his will at that white lunar body, a kind of insect antedating all history ...
---
... that whatever they might do was no use whatsoever, that whatever they might do the result would be the same, humiliation, a deadly routine, the monotonous years, calamitous disasters that would continue to nibble away at clothes and the soul, taking refuge in a resentful solitude, in some local bistro. [...] an infinity of poor devils repeating a pattern without knowing it, convinced of their freedom of will and choice. The man was crying in his beer, only it was wine in this case, what could you do about it, nothing.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris is probably the funniest in a collection whose major tonality is dark and anxious. It is almost a prank, the story of a man house-sitting for a friend visiting overseas, and of an infestations of rabbits.
I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
The rabbit in question is for me the result of the creative mind, the poem or the story or the painting that the artist produces in order to explain the world better, when regular words fail to capture the feelings he is experiencing:
A month is a rabbit, it really makes a real rabbit; but in the maiden moment, the warm bustling fleece covering an inalienable presence ... like a poem in its first minutes, “fruit of an Idumean night” as much one as oneself ... and afterwards not so much one, so distant and isolated in its flat white world the size of a letter.
Continuity of Parks is something that I think every modern writer has tried at one point or another: metafiction, the reader being read, being inside and outside of the story and being visited by the characters from the book. Scary, clever and thought provoking.
Bestiary is a bit longer than the previous stories, but all good. A young girl is send away every summer to Las Horneros, a mansion in the countryside, and the pains of growing up in the midst of obtuse minded adults are reflected in the kids’ obsessions with ants, mantises, scary and disgusting bugs and insects of every sort. Oh, and there’s a tiger that for some obscure reason is walking in and out of the house as it pleases.
The Gates of Heaven is a love story of sorts, a requiem for a woman who died too young and a nostalgic memento of the Argentinian passion for dancing - tangos, machichas, boleros, etc – of cheap dancing halls tiered like the rings of the underworld in Dante’s Inferno, and lives getting lost in the anonymity of trivial pursuits (again)
Blow Up is the title story, and it is easy to see why. Michael is more than a photographer, he is an artist with an unquenchable curiosity about the world around him, prone to flights of fancy but able to see deeper and truer into the lives of the people around him, able to enjoy the sun, the streets, the life surrounding him as only people who look at the world trough a special lens, searching to capture its essence in a still image, can do.
In all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone, or the pigtails-flying run of a small girl home with a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Michael knew that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world as other than the camera insiduously imposed on it.
There is a mystery, a puzzle to anchor the story, as Michael witnesses a strange duo having an argument on the quai of Ile St Louis and as he tries to imagine what they are fighting about and what their lives are like ( Michael is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities. ). There is also danger, and a recurring theme of clouds passing overhead that I will not spoil other than to say that I see it as the result of the artist being unable to live in an ivory tower, insulated from life, coldly objective ( ... to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention. ). There is, as I have become by now accustomed to, ambiguity and metaphor and mystery that make the story open to interpretation depending on the reader’s own reaction and experience. I am sure I will look now with different eyes at the movie version, trying to find the common ground as well as the artistic licence the Italian filmmaker used.
End of the Game is a second story focusing on the growing up pains and on the weird universe the children create around themselves in their innocence. Three girls are playing hooky from their house during siesta time and dress up for the entertainment of passing trains in costumes and jewelry from their elders, re-enacting theatrical and historical personages. Reality tries to intrude in the form of a young man who witnesses their antics, but the girls remain impenetrable in their private dreams.
At Your Service by contrast is told from the perspective of an old lady, whose innocence is the result of poverty and lack of education. After being employed as a dog sitter for a posh Parisian party, she is latter bribed to impersonate a grieving mother for the funeral of a talented and gay fashion artist. Her point of view is used as an accusing finger at the hypocrisy, meanness and fake glitter of the haute-monde.
The Pursuer is my favorite novella from a crowded pack of candidates here. Like Blow-Up, it looks at the condition of the artist, exploring the final days of a famous American jazz player, told by his friend and critic witnessing the dissolution induced by drugs and excessive habits, the unpredictable mood swings and the moments of genius that can only be expressed through music. Wikipedia gives as the source of inspiration for the story the life off jazz giant Charlie Parker, who revolutionized saxophone playing in the sixties with his fast technique and daring improvisations.
Now you know what can happen in a minute and a half ... Then a man, not just me but her and you and all the boys, they could live hundreds of years, if we could find the way we could live a thousand times faster than we’re living because of the damn clocks, that mania for minutes and for the day after tomorrow
Most of the piece is a duel between the jazzman and the critic, between the tortured soul who searches for illumination in drugs and wild imaginings and the analytical man who likes order and clear cut situations, the one who creates and the one who only listens. Johnnie/Charlie sees himself like Jim Morrison – as an opener of doors, letting the sunshine into a darkened room.
I feel like there’s something that I’d like to admit at some point, a light that’s looking to be lit, or better yet, as though it were necessary to break something, split it from top to bottom like a log, setting a wedge in until the job’s done.
Johnnie/Charlie is surprisingly revealed as the one closer to the hidden truth of existence, more in touch with his subconscious, either though drugs or through honest intellectual curiosity, wary of the smarty-pants who believe they already know everything while the world around us is still full of mystery and wonder:
That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what, tell me what now, when a poor devil like me with more plagues than the devil under his skin had enough awareness to feel that everything was like jelly, that everything was shaky everywhere, you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes.
Secret Weapons ends the collection, and it’s not bad, but suffers a little from coming along right after the body blows in The Pursuer. Thematically it is a return to the question of ghost memories and parallel lives, in this case a young man who tries to woo his girlfriend but has scary flashbacks from another lifetime as a German soldier during the war. The girl herself has her own secrets from dealing with the French Resistance, and possibly with said German soldier in another timeline. The intersection of the closely guarded secrets can result in another tale with strong horror overtones, reminding me for some reason of a Bradbury collection I read earlier in the year.
A conclusion and recommendation is not easy to write, my own interest in Cortazar being helped along by my fascination with jazz and photography and South American magical realism. Nevertheless, I believe all lovers of good literature will enjoy his stories. Last quote is an invitation to more flights of fancy:
Do you have fireflies in you garden?
After spending some quality time in the company of Julio Cortazar and his choice short prose, I believe I can more easily identify with the weirdness, wonder and mystery of existence, as seen though the ‘lens’ of his imagination. I may not be sure which side of the glass wall I am standing right now and what exactly I am looking at, but I recognize that reality/ realism is not providing all the answers I need, and that sometimes we need a tiger roaming around the house for his own reasons ( Bestiary) , other times fluffy rabbits pop out of our mouths ( Letter to a Young Lady in Paris), an entire life can be told in a minute and a half of a jazz tune ( The Pursuer ) and axolotls know better than us what the meaning of life is:
It’s that we don’t enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped – we barely move in any direction and we’re hitting one of the others with our tail or our head – difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it’s less if we stay quietly.
I have come across the name often enough in references to influential modern writers and ‘best of’ lists of South American writers, I have even seen the Antonioni movie a couple of times without clicking on to the source material, but this is my first read of Cortazar stories. The hype is in his case entirely justified, at least as far as I am concerned. He is a master stylist, a poet that playfully yet carefully constructs his phrases (I wish I could be able to read in the original Spanish, or at least in the French he adopted in his later career). The main attraction is not the prose itself, so much as the masterful capture of things usually left unsaid, of the inner labyrinths of the psyche where logic and science must take second place to the fears of the subconscious. His stories are more metaphor than mirror of the world, and almost all of them provide an unusual angle, a skewed point of view that is meant to push us out of the comfort zone and challenge us to consider said world and our fellow humans from a new perspective, like that of a tiny invertebrate:
Or it was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.
I don’t think the stories included in the present collection have been written in a planned manner, as one of those interlinked episodes that together form a whole novel, yet I got an impression of consistency and continuity from the ensemble, of an unique voice that may put on different masks, yet remains true to its inner self and remains troubled by the same questions of identity, loneliness, limited means of communication and art as a sublimation of life.
Axolotl opens the book, just like my review, with an invitation to consider that as we are looking at the world, the world is looking back at us. We are maybe haunted by our lizard brains who remember a time we lived in primeval swamps waiting for our minds to develop higher powers of reasoning.
House Taken Over is almost a horror story, the tale of a brother and sister living alone in a big mansion somewhere in Argentina, spending their entire lives cloistered inside, one of them reading books, the other knitting useless knick-knacks. ( We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.) Slowly, inexorably, mysterious and invisible visitors/ burglars/ strangers are pushing them out of the nest, room by room, until the whole house is locked out and the duo is left destitute on the streets. I think the metaphor here is the way we waste our best years in inconsequential pursuits, denying the slow draining of the sand from the hourglass.
The Distances is another haunting story, this time the hunting of a young woman’s dreams, instead of a house. Alina Reyes has trouble falling asleep, and when she does she experiences the life of a woman thousands of miles away, in Budapest. The theme of confused identity and soul changing will be reiterated in other stories in the collection, almost always with an unexpected ending and a provocation to make sense of events that defy logic and common sense. See as examples The Idol of the Cyclades where an archaeological team discovers and ancient fertility statue, and later in Paris they get involved in a dangerous love triangle that may be provoked by the memories stored in the ancient stone; or A Yellow Flower where a middle aged man thinks he has discovered his doppelganger in a young boy he sees on the street, doomed to repeat the same life he has lived through once already; or The Night Face Up where a young man has a bike accident and the trauma flips his brain into reliving the emotions of an Aztec prisoner being prepared for ritual slaughter. A couple of quotes from these stories highlight the concept of deja-vu, of repeated histories and subconscious memory:
... the coming and going gestures of his hands which also seemed to want to glue pieces of air, putting together a transparent vase, his hands pointed out the statuette, obliging Morand to look once more against his will at that white lunar body, a kind of insect antedating all history ...
---
... that whatever they might do was no use whatsoever, that whatever they might do the result would be the same, humiliation, a deadly routine, the monotonous years, calamitous disasters that would continue to nibble away at clothes and the soul, taking refuge in a resentful solitude, in some local bistro. [...] an infinity of poor devils repeating a pattern without knowing it, convinced of their freedom of will and choice. The man was crying in his beer, only it was wine in this case, what could you do about it, nothing.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris is probably the funniest in a collection whose major tonality is dark and anxious. It is almost a prank, the story of a man house-sitting for a friend visiting overseas, and of an infestations of rabbits.
I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
The rabbit in question is for me the result of the creative mind, the poem or the story or the painting that the artist produces in order to explain the world better, when regular words fail to capture the feelings he is experiencing:
A month is a rabbit, it really makes a real rabbit; but in the maiden moment, the warm bustling fleece covering an inalienable presence ... like a poem in its first minutes, “fruit of an Idumean night” as much one as oneself ... and afterwards not so much one, so distant and isolated in its flat white world the size of a letter.
Continuity of Parks is something that I think every modern writer has tried at one point or another: metafiction, the reader being read, being inside and outside of the story and being visited by the characters from the book. Scary, clever and thought provoking.
Bestiary is a bit longer than the previous stories, but all good. A young girl is send away every summer to Las Horneros, a mansion in the countryside, and the pains of growing up in the midst of obtuse minded adults are reflected in the kids’ obsessions with ants, mantises, scary and disgusting bugs and insects of every sort. Oh, and there’s a tiger that for some obscure reason is walking in and out of the house as it pleases.
The Gates of Heaven is a love story of sorts, a requiem for a woman who died too young and a nostalgic memento of the Argentinian passion for dancing - tangos, machichas, boleros, etc – of cheap dancing halls tiered like the rings of the underworld in Dante’s Inferno, and lives getting lost in the anonymity of trivial pursuits (again)
Blow Up is the title story, and it is easy to see why. Michael is more than a photographer, he is an artist with an unquenchable curiosity about the world around him, prone to flights of fancy but able to see deeper and truer into the lives of the people around him, able to enjoy the sun, the streets, the life surrounding him as only people who look at the world trough a special lens, searching to capture its essence in a still image, can do.
In all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone, or the pigtails-flying run of a small girl home with a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Michael knew that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world as other than the camera insiduously imposed on it.
There is a mystery, a puzzle to anchor the story, as Michael witnesses a strange duo having an argument on the quai of Ile St Louis and as he tries to imagine what they are fighting about and what their lives are like ( Michael is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities. ). There is also danger, and a recurring theme of clouds passing overhead that I will not spoil other than to say that I see it as the result of the artist being unable to live in an ivory tower, insulated from life, coldly objective ( ... to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention. ). There is, as I have become by now accustomed to, ambiguity and metaphor and mystery that make the story open to interpretation depending on the reader’s own reaction and experience. I am sure I will look now with different eyes at the movie version, trying to find the common ground as well as the artistic licence the Italian filmmaker used.
End of the Game is a second story focusing on the growing up pains and on the weird universe the children create around themselves in their innocence. Three girls are playing hooky from their house during siesta time and dress up for the entertainment of passing trains in costumes and jewelry from their elders, re-enacting theatrical and historical personages. Reality tries to intrude in the form of a young man who witnesses their antics, but the girls remain impenetrable in their private dreams.
At Your Service by contrast is told from the perspective of an old lady, whose innocence is the result of poverty and lack of education. After being employed as a dog sitter for a posh Parisian party, she is latter bribed to impersonate a grieving mother for the funeral of a talented and gay fashion artist. Her point of view is used as an accusing finger at the hypocrisy, meanness and fake glitter of the haute-monde.
The Pursuer is my favorite novella from a crowded pack of candidates here. Like Blow-Up, it looks at the condition of the artist, exploring the final days of a famous American jazz player, told by his friend and critic witnessing the dissolution induced by drugs and excessive habits, the unpredictable mood swings and the moments of genius that can only be expressed through music. Wikipedia gives as the source of inspiration for the story the life off jazz giant Charlie Parker, who revolutionized saxophone playing in the sixties with his fast technique and daring improvisations.
Now you know what can happen in a minute and a half ... Then a man, not just me but her and you and all the boys, they could live hundreds of years, if we could find the way we could live a thousand times faster than we’re living because of the damn clocks, that mania for minutes and for the day after tomorrow
Most of the piece is a duel between the jazzman and the critic, between the tortured soul who searches for illumination in drugs and wild imaginings and the analytical man who likes order and clear cut situations, the one who creates and the one who only listens. Johnnie/Charlie sees himself like Jim Morrison – as an opener of doors, letting the sunshine into a darkened room.
I feel like there’s something that I’d like to admit at some point, a light that’s looking to be lit, or better yet, as though it were necessary to break something, split it from top to bottom like a log, setting a wedge in until the job’s done.
Johnnie/Charlie is surprisingly revealed as the one closer to the hidden truth of existence, more in touch with his subconscious, either though drugs or through honest intellectual curiosity, wary of the smarty-pants who believe they already know everything while the world around us is still full of mystery and wonder:
That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what, tell me what now, when a poor devil like me with more plagues than the devil under his skin had enough awareness to feel that everything was like jelly, that everything was shaky everywhere, you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes.
Secret Weapons ends the collection, and it’s not bad, but suffers a little from coming along right after the body blows in The Pursuer. Thematically it is a return to the question of ghost memories and parallel lives, in this case a young man who tries to woo his girlfriend but has scary flashbacks from another lifetime as a German soldier during the war. The girl herself has her own secrets from dealing with the French Resistance, and possibly with said German soldier in another timeline. The intersection of the closely guarded secrets can result in another tale with strong horror overtones, reminding me for some reason of a Bradbury collection I read earlier in the year.
A conclusion and recommendation is not easy to write, my own interest in Cortazar being helped along by my fascination with jazz and photography and South American magical realism. Nevertheless, I believe all lovers of good literature will enjoy his stories. Last quote is an invitation to more flights of fancy:
Do you have fireflies in you garden?
August 14, 2012
This volume is my introduction to Cortázar, part of my 2012 Year of Discovering Latin American and Spanish writers. I have his novels on my horizon, and I'm itching to read them, but I thought starting with a short story volume would be a good introduction.
In the past, I have neglected short stories, in part because of an early preference for huge novels that I could escape in for days at a time. There may have been some elements of an introvert's frustration over getting to know a series of characters, only to say goodbye to them after 15 pages or so and to have to ready myself for meeting a whole new set of characters all over again. (Silly, I know - treating a short story collection as a literary cocktail party.)
I'm very glad that I've shaken off those earlier views, because I found this collection to be captivating. Cortázar destablizes our understandings of identity in every story. Characters merge into other characters. Boundaries, physical and psychic, dissolve in thin air. When reading the first story, Axolotl, I actually had a physical sense of my perspective shifting at a key point in the story, almost as if I were watching a film and visualizing an extreme change in perspective. Cortázar also is masterful at creating a surreal atmosphere of menace in many of these stories, which is all the more effective because the danger doesn't unfold all at once. It creeps up on the reader.
I have read other reviewers who discussed their confusion when reading many of these stories. Cortázar often uses a technique of jumping midway into his narrative and leaving it up to the reader to patiently hang on for the ride until he provides clues to piece together later in the story. If you're willing to play along with Cortázar, there's a game-like quality in many of these stories. For this reason, I recommend not reading it all at once from beginning to end. Some time between stories helps to increase the feeling of tension at Cortázar's approach.
This is a volume that begs for re-reading. I plan to revisit it soon.
In the past, I have neglected short stories, in part because of an early preference for huge novels that I could escape in for days at a time. There may have been some elements of an introvert's frustration over getting to know a series of characters, only to say goodbye to them after 15 pages or so and to have to ready myself for meeting a whole new set of characters all over again. (Silly, I know - treating a short story collection as a literary cocktail party.)
I'm very glad that I've shaken off those earlier views, because I found this collection to be captivating. Cortázar destablizes our understandings of identity in every story. Characters merge into other characters. Boundaries, physical and psychic, dissolve in thin air. When reading the first story, Axolotl, I actually had a physical sense of my perspective shifting at a key point in the story, almost as if I were watching a film and visualizing an extreme change in perspective. Cortázar also is masterful at creating a surreal atmosphere of menace in many of these stories, which is all the more effective because the danger doesn't unfold all at once. It creeps up on the reader.
I have read other reviewers who discussed their confusion when reading many of these stories. Cortázar often uses a technique of jumping midway into his narrative and leaving it up to the reader to patiently hang on for the ride until he provides clues to piece together later in the story. If you're willing to play along with Cortázar, there's a game-like quality in many of these stories. For this reason, I recommend not reading it all at once from beginning to end. Some time between stories helps to increase the feeling of tension at Cortázar's approach.
This is a volume that begs for re-reading. I plan to revisit it soon.
June 28, 2016
Here are stories of the prismatic-elastic-imaginative-labyrinthine type. Okay, Cortazar isn’t for everyone - his sentences stubbornly don’t do what you expect them to do, and those readers resistant to the particular magic of language, that it can simultaneously be music and meaning, archaic and capable of instigating a profoundly new perspective, bewildering and grounding, need not proceed. Those of you who have already closed avenues of readerly-possibility off, need not proceed. Those of you who read primarily to have the book perform how you wish it to perform, rather than to perform the book according to the choreography of the author, need not proceed. But for the rest of you good readers, Cortazar is utterly refreshing, absent of cliche, deeply committed to positing his metaphysical riddles in lattice-like compact tales, at home at play in the nearly infinite field of the imagination. This is literature that eases its unease and its multiple eyes into your way of seeing, alters and massages the pulse of your quotidian roamings into something less sure-footed, more ready to be toppled, Reality a thing to be only suspect of, permanently called into question. And it is accomplished in beautiful, unique sentences. These are stories to be read and re-read, to better fortify yourself against the stultifying nature of habitual, inertial modes of thinking and living. Cortazar’s long novel Hopscotch is another antidote to this dulling down. Highly recommended.
May 29, 2016
"I prefer the words to the reality that I'm trying to describe.",
says Cortázar. Through his exquisitely beautiful sentences what he offers is more than reality. The question of magical realism as his style is debatable. But what his stories overwhelm with is eccentricity. Most of his stories can be easily classified as 'uncanny', because of his way of encompassing his characters in a surreal mystery, of which they think as reality.
Time and Identity evidently seem to be the play things for Cortázar. Almost all his characters have some kind of ambiguous assertion over their existence. The aquarium frequenter from Axolotl says, in a trance, “Now I am an axolotl.”. Imagine a man claims to be his object of obsession. Is it neotenous metamorphosis or unconscious awareness? It is up to us, the readers. From The Pursuer, "I am not I", Johnny says feverishly. If he is not he, who is he?
This recurring question of identity simmers across the lives of almost all his protagonists - a guy who vomits rabbits, sisters posing as statues beside railroads for the weary travelers, a widowed maid appearing as the mother of her employer's guest, a reader who becomes the victim of the mystery novel he reads, a fiance who is haunted by ideas of 'otherness', and so on. Even amidst these alienness and otherness, the closeness among the characters can be warmly felt and their dialogues echoing inside us.
Will the story be invalid, if it was told in a different tense? Such is the point of Cortázar. Most of the time he keeps us going without knowing what is happening has already happened or is going to happen, but leading only to a stranger fantasy.
Blow Up
Neither the protagonist nor the author reveals everything that has to be told about the story. In the forms of unsnapped photographs, the story is told, with a single click to blow up someone's devious scheme and to free a poor boy, and ending up with a large sized photograph of an illusory reality.
Instead of creating an incredible universe for his characters, what Cortázar did in these stories truly deserves undue admiration: A day-to-day reality, but with a spine chilling twists...
December 3, 2017
میلان کوندرا در کتاب «هنر رمان» میگوید که رمان، هستی را میکاود، نه واقعیت را و هستی آنچه روی داده نیست. اگر همین گفته را به داستان کوتاه هم بشود بسط داد، میتوان گفت که خولیو کرتاثار یک کاشف زبده است. گواهش هم این استکه کرتاثار توانسته امور غیرواقعی را در بستر واقعیت روایت کند بدون آن که ساختار داستان دچار ان��ک تزلزلی بشود. بدون آنکه به باورپذیری داستانها خدشهای وارد شود.
داستانها به جز ویژگی غیرواقعی بودنِ کاملاً باورپذیرشان (البته که بعضی داستانها کاملاً رئال هستند) از حیث تنوع هم قابل توجهاند. داستانها در فضاها و همچنین توسط راویانی نقل میشوند که بهشدت از یکنواختی بهدورند و محال است خواننده را دچار کسالت کنند. موزیسن مبتلا به شیزوفرنی، پیرزن مستخدم بیچاره، بچههای شیطان و بازیگوش و دیگر جای هیچ شخصیتی در این مجموعه خالی نیست و کمترین چیزی که نصیب خواننده میشود، فارغ از هر دریافتی، لذت متن است.
و شاید لازم به توضیح نباشد که فیلم Blow-Up ��اختهی آنتونیونی، اقتباسی از داستان «آگراندیسمان» در این مجموعه است که به دلیل شناخته شده بودن فیلم، نام مجموعه را به خود گرفته است.
داستانها به جز ویژگی غیرواقعی بودنِ کاملاً باورپذیرشان (البته که بعضی داستانها کاملاً رئال هستند) از حیث تنوع هم قابل توجهاند. داستانها در فضاها و همچنین توسط راویانی نقل میشوند که بهشدت از یکنواختی بهدورند و محال است خواننده را دچار کسالت کنند. موزیسن مبتلا به شیزوفرنی، پیرزن مستخدم بیچاره، بچههای شیطان و بازیگوش و دیگر جای هیچ شخصیتی در این مجموعه خالی نیست و کمترین چیزی که نصیب خواننده میشود، فارغ از هر دریافتی، لذت متن است.
و شاید لازم به توضیح نباشد که فیلم Blow-Up ��اختهی آنتونیونی، اقتباسی از داستان «آگراندیسمان» در این مجموعه است که به دلیل شناخته شده بودن فیلم، نام مجموعه را به خود گرفته است.
September 21, 2024
خب کتاب حاضر از سری مینیماژ نشر نیماژ هستش. اولا بگم که کار واقعا جالبی کرده نشر نیماژ که یهسری داستان کوتاه رو تو یه کتاب جیبی جمع کرده. دست مریزاد.
تو این کتاب یهسری داستان کوتاه از بورخس، کورتاسار، کاسارس، بولانیو و کیروگا اومده. هر ۵ تا نویسنده قلم و سبک خاص خودشون رو دارن که اغلب میشه اونارو جزو رئالیسم جادویی یا حتی سوررئالیسم دونست.
اینطوری نیست که بگم از داستانها خوشم نیومد یا داستانهای خوبی نبودن. از قضا خیلی هم شوکهکننده و عجیب بودن. اینکه در عین عادی بودن یهسری چیزا روایت میشد که شوکهکننده بود.
ارتباط برقرار کردن با محتوای داستانها بهشخصه سخت بود برام، با اینکه فرم داستانهارو دوس داشتم و ایدهدار بودن ولی نتونستم فرم و محتوا رو تلفیق کنم و درک درستی از ترکیب این دو بهدست بیارم.
یکی از داستانهایی که خیلی دوس داشتم داستان فلامینگوها بود.
نمره من ۲.۵ خواهد بود.
تو این کتاب یهسری داستان کوتاه از بورخس، کورتاسار، کاسارس، بولانیو و کیروگا اومده. هر ۵ تا نویسنده قلم و سبک خاص خودشون رو دارن که اغلب میشه اونارو جزو رئالیسم جادویی یا حتی سوررئالیسم دونست.
اینطوری نیست که بگم از داستانها خوشم نیومد یا داستانهای خوبی نبودن. از قضا خیلی هم شوکهکننده و عجیب بودن. اینکه در عین عادی بودن یهسری چیزا روایت میشد که شوکهکننده بود.
ارتباط برقرار کردن با محتوای داستانها بهشخصه سخت بود برام، با اینکه فرم داستانهارو دوس داشتم و ایدهدار بودن ولی نتونستم فرم و محتوا رو تلفیق کنم و درک درستی از ترکیب این دو بهدست بیارم.
یکی از داستانهایی که خیلی دوس داشتم داستان فلامینگوها بود.
نمره من ۲.۵ خواهد بود.
December 14, 2020
3.5 stars
I had looked forward to reading Blow-Up and Other Stories by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar for several years, but though I found some of the stories to be downright brilliant, the collective whole was a bit of a disappointment. I've heard a lot of comparisons between this writer and Jorge Luis Borges, and though those comparisons are certainly valid, I personally find that Borges at his best slightly exceeds the quality of Cortázar at his.
Some of these stories I absolutely loved, my favourites being The Night Face Up, Bestiary, Blow-Up, and End of the Game. It's hard to pin down Cortázar's style; some of his stories contain magical realism, some are metaphysical, and some are just ordinary stories grounded in a normal reality. He writes beautifully for the most part, and can invoke specific images and associations in the reader's mind, like Borges. One interesting thing I noted is that several of the stories feature the same everyday items, particularly nescafé, Gauloise cigarettes, and cognac. One has to wonder if Cortázar himself enjoyed these things, or if they were just prevalent in France at the time he was writing his stories (or maybe if they're still prevalent there today).
Though I liked many of the stories in this collection, some, like The Pursuer, I just didn't get the point of. That particular story is over 60 pages long, making it by far the longest in the entire collection, and it revolves around a group of friends that hover in the orbit of Johnny Carter, a drug-addicted, schizophrenic, insane jazz musician who has lost his grip on life. The story is mostly filled with Johnny's crazy ramblings about time and reality, nothing of note ever happens, and after a while it just became a tedious read. I didn't get anything out of that story, and was glad when it was over. Further, some of the stories were what I would call "word soup"; they're well-written and highlight Cortázar's abilities as a wordsmith, but there isn't much substance to them.
Overall, this is a decent collection, though it's a bit of a disappointment compared to something like Labyrinths by Borges. That being said, I still recommend checking it out.
Here are my ratings for each story out of five, and my cumulative score for the whole book:
Axolotl: 4/5
House Taken Over: 4/5
The Distances: 3/5
The Idol of the Cyclades: 3.5/5
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris: 2/5
A Yellow Flower: 1/5
Continuity of Parks: 2/5
The Night Face Up: 5/5
Bestiary: 5/5
The Gates of Heaven: 2.5/5
Blow-Up: 5/5
End of the Game: 5/5
At Your Service: 4/5
The Pursuer: 1/5
Secret Weapons: 4/5
51/75 = 68% = 3.4 stars
I had looked forward to reading Blow-Up and Other Stories by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar for several years, but though I found some of the stories to be downright brilliant, the collective whole was a bit of a disappointment. I've heard a lot of comparisons between this writer and Jorge Luis Borges, and though those comparisons are certainly valid, I personally find that Borges at his best slightly exceeds the quality of Cortázar at his.
Some of these stories I absolutely loved, my favourites being The Night Face Up, Bestiary, Blow-Up, and End of the Game. It's hard to pin down Cortázar's style; some of his stories contain magical realism, some are metaphysical, and some are just ordinary stories grounded in a normal reality. He writes beautifully for the most part, and can invoke specific images and associations in the reader's mind, like Borges. One interesting thing I noted is that several of the stories feature the same everyday items, particularly nescafé, Gauloise cigarettes, and cognac. One has to wonder if Cortázar himself enjoyed these things, or if they were just prevalent in France at the time he was writing his stories (or maybe if they're still prevalent there today).
Though I liked many of the stories in this collection, some, like The Pursuer, I just didn't get the point of. That particular story is over 60 pages long, making it by far the longest in the entire collection, and it revolves around a group of friends that hover in the orbit of Johnny Carter, a drug-addicted, schizophrenic, insane jazz musician who has lost his grip on life. The story is mostly filled with Johnny's crazy ramblings about time and reality, nothing of note ever happens, and after a while it just became a tedious read. I didn't get anything out of that story, and was glad when it was over. Further, some of the stories were what I would call "word soup"; they're well-written and highlight Cortázar's abilities as a wordsmith, but there isn't much substance to them.
Overall, this is a decent collection, though it's a bit of a disappointment compared to something like Labyrinths by Borges. That being said, I still recommend checking it out.
Here are my ratings for each story out of five, and my cumulative score for the whole book:
Axolotl: 4/5
House Taken Over: 4/5
The Distances: 3/5
The Idol of the Cyclades: 3.5/5
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris: 2/5
A Yellow Flower: 1/5
Continuity of Parks: 2/5
The Night Face Up: 5/5
Bestiary: 5/5
The Gates of Heaven: 2.5/5
Blow-Up: 5/5
End of the Game: 5/5
At Your Service: 4/5
The Pursuer: 1/5
Secret Weapons: 4/5
51/75 = 68% = 3.4 stars
August 26, 2017
Cover of the 1968 Collier Books mass-market paperback (248 pages).
November 22, 2018
Having taken a bigger interest in Latin-American writers in the past few years, I was asked the question recently had I ever read julio cortazar? No, I hadn't, I replied. I was then asked are you a fan of the short-story? Yes, yes I am, I said. I was then told to absolutely read Blow-Up and Other Stories. So I did. And although I can't score it a five, it was a collection that really grabbed my attention. I found then vividly experimental in nature, and a mixture of all sorts of things, some surrealism, a strong sense of symbolism, a little bit nouveau roman, and the Borgesian fantastical. There is also a feeling Cortázar had a big thing for Identity, and he displays throughout these tales the capacity to elevate them above the condition of the gimmicky which depend solely on a twist ending or some big finale. Comparison with other writers is difficult because he seems to have a voice all of his own. They are like nothing I have read before. I had to read the title story three times before before moving on to the others, it dazzled the hell out of me. I found the stories ranged from being good to damn right brilliant!
November 6, 2018
Öykü okumayı neden seviyorum onu hatırladım Cortazar öyküleriyle. Bulunduğum yerden uzaklaşıp bambaşka dünyalara buyur edildim. Hem de kısa kısa aralıklarla. Gezdim, tozdum, eğlendim, korktum, sevdim, üzüldüm, sonra evime geri döndüm.
Sen çok yaşa(!) Cortazar :)
Sen çok yaşa(!) Cortazar :)
May 23, 2022
Cortazar’dan 13 güzel gerçeküstücü/fantastik öykü. Kalemi ile öykülerde sizi gezdirirken bir hızlanıyor bir ani dönüş yapıyor, sersemlemiyorsunuz ama, siz de onun kalem oyunlarına teslim oluyorsunuz. Anlatılanların gerçekdışı olduğunu bilmenize rağmen sizi niye olmasın diye düşündürüyor hatta bunun yaşanabileceğine inandırıyor sizi Cortazar. En çok sevdiklerim “Oyunun Sonu”, “Ele Geçirilen Ev”, “Pariste Bir Genç Hanıma Mektuplar” oldu. Hikaye seviyorsanız öneririm.
October 4, 2018
سکوت نادیدنی کورتاسار
November 7, 2014
I've been starting a lot of story collections lately without (yet) finishing them, and this is another of those. I was reading it aloud, which is interesting and a little tricky, because the words here perform very strange and nuanced tricks of tone and configuration, resulting in elegant sentences that don't always make immediate sense. At least not until they've fully left the mouth, which can make it a challenge to anticipate the cadences and stresses as they emerge.
Published in 1968, but actually translated all from three earlier collections, dated 1951, 1956, and 1959. All seemingly quite great.
Breakdown:
Axolotl -- Jimmy seems to have been seduced entirely by the sounds of the words in this story, to the point that the story's mechanism barely matters. But I would say the wonderful flow of the words serves the mechanism, it creates a necessary slipperiness, a fluidity, an essential changeability. It really is an excellent and uniquely formed story, from either standpoint.
The House Taken Over -- A kind of a ghost story. Or not! In a world of uncertainties by omission, the rules may be unpredictable. I assume nothing.
The Distances -- Perhaps reconfiguration of Axolotl over a different spatial and personal system, to very different ends. The perspective switches here create a gorgeous confusion, it takes some time to grasp the terms. But the arc and voice are, nonetheless, immaculately formed.
The Idol of the Cyclades -- Actually, in some ways Axolotl is the purest example of a technique repeated in many variations throughout this collection: a kind of bleeding-through of perspective until a switching of places (of characters, of perspectives, of times, of consciousnesses) has taken place). Here, the change is apparently the induced madness of a still-powerful primitive icon, in a kind of interior horror story.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris -- This, however, is actually the outlier, a bizarre premise is enacted and then the protagonist mostly just worries about its absurd practical implications and attempts to explain himself. Kinda great!
The Continuity of Parks -- The shortest, simplest of Cortazar's "crossing-over" stories (and one that has essentially become a lame ghost story form in the intervening years) and yet there's a perfection in the actual idea of "the continuity of parks". Essentially, it posits a liminal space in the woods where levels of narrative reality can intermingle and be moved freely between. This is a device in much post-modern writing, but with less of a literal locus of narrative destabilization than this usually. It's an excellent concept, simply expressed here and so easy to remap and expand across other uses.
(starting to skip some as I don't have time to note down all right now!)
Blow-Up -- Completely different from the Antonioni film, but also fantastic. Fantastically slippery and unsettling at all levels of content. Need to re-read perhaps.
At Your Service -- Great voice here, very warm and personal and different from every other narrator in these: an old women, working as a maid, who performs a couple very unrelated and, um, unusual tasks for a wealthy family and society circle. Through her eyes a very sympathetic, if somewhat uncomprehending, view of a portion of Parisian culture.
The Pursuer -- Actually more of a novella, a long treatment of a jazz musician in struggle with reality, with music his escape and his bane, and the center of his struggle. Great, though at times the jazz-writer narrator can be terribly patronizing towards his subject / friend(?). In retrospect, though you spend the length of the story dangerously awash in his voice and self-justification, he's a total vampire, which is probably a not-inaccurate portrait of certain parts of jazz journalism and race-relations in those times. Complicatedly, Cortazar takes on racism not in any overt case, but in those subtler unknowing examples with so much power to harm -- and as far as those go, not so much has changed since the 50s. (My initial reaction was a little more ambiguous, see discussion below)
The Secret Weapons -- An excellently creepy ghost story of another kind, where history and memory may be the things that haunt and consume.
Published in 1968, but actually translated all from three earlier collections, dated 1951, 1956, and 1959. All seemingly quite great.
Breakdown:
Axolotl -- Jimmy seems to have been seduced entirely by the sounds of the words in this story, to the point that the story's mechanism barely matters. But I would say the wonderful flow of the words serves the mechanism, it creates a necessary slipperiness, a fluidity, an essential changeability. It really is an excellent and uniquely formed story, from either standpoint.
The House Taken Over -- A kind of a ghost story. Or not! In a world of uncertainties by omission, the rules may be unpredictable. I assume nothing.
The Distances -- Perhaps reconfiguration of Axolotl over a different spatial and personal system, to very different ends. The perspective switches here create a gorgeous confusion, it takes some time to grasp the terms. But the arc and voice are, nonetheless, immaculately formed.
The Idol of the Cyclades -- Actually, in some ways Axolotl is the purest example of a technique repeated in many variations throughout this collection: a kind of bleeding-through of perspective until a switching of places (of characters, of perspectives, of times, of consciousnesses) has taken place). Here, the change is apparently the induced madness of a still-powerful primitive icon, in a kind of interior horror story.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris -- This, however, is actually the outlier, a bizarre premise is enacted and then the protagonist mostly just worries about its absurd practical implications and attempts to explain himself. Kinda great!
The Continuity of Parks -- The shortest, simplest of Cortazar's "crossing-over" stories (and one that has essentially become a lame ghost story form in the intervening years) and yet there's a perfection in the actual idea of "the continuity of parks". Essentially, it posits a liminal space in the woods where levels of narrative reality can intermingle and be moved freely between. This is a device in much post-modern writing, but with less of a literal locus of narrative destabilization than this usually. It's an excellent concept, simply expressed here and so easy to remap and expand across other uses.
(starting to skip some as I don't have time to note down all right now!)
Blow-Up -- Completely different from the Antonioni film, but also fantastic. Fantastically slippery and unsettling at all levels of content. Need to re-read perhaps.
At Your Service -- Great voice here, very warm and personal and different from every other narrator in these: an old women, working as a maid, who performs a couple very unrelated and, um, unusual tasks for a wealthy family and society circle. Through her eyes a very sympathetic, if somewhat uncomprehending, view of a portion of Parisian culture.
The Pursuer -- Actually more of a novella, a long treatment of a jazz musician in struggle with reality, with music his escape and his bane, and the center of his struggle. Great, though at times the jazz-writer narrator can be terribly patronizing towards his subject / friend(?). In retrospect, though you spend the length of the story dangerously awash in his voice and self-justification, he's a total vampire, which is probably a not-inaccurate portrait of certain parts of jazz journalism and race-relations in those times. Complicatedly, Cortazar takes on racism not in any overt case, but in those subtler unknowing examples with so much power to harm -- and as far as those go, not so much has changed since the 50s. (My initial reaction was a little more ambiguous, see discussion below)
The Secret Weapons -- An excellently creepy ghost story of another kind, where history and memory may be the things that haunt and consume.
September 2, 2023
Interesting story. Rather unconventional storytelling. Probably not for all audiences. Three and a half stars.
May 22, 2017
Cinco histórias reveladoras da genialidade de Cortázar. Não gostei de todas da mesma forma, nem as compreendi no seu todo. Exigem muito do leitor pela sua estrutura complexa, significados ocultos e finais abertos.
Blow-up
é o título do filme de Antonioni, inspirado no conto Las Babas del Diablo.
Mais do que pela história subjacente - um fotógrafo que observa e fotografa três pessoas e que constrói o acontecimento através da análise da foto - o conto é fascinante pela originalidade do narrador, que intercala entre a primeira e a terceira pessoa. Muito curioso e interessante.
5*
As cartas da mãe
de como as ilusões, os sonhos, as mentiras, criados na mente servem para camuflar um casamento moribundo; para sobreviver à morte de um filho; para atenuar remorsos...
5*
Os bons serviços
é uma história divertida sobre uma senhora contratada como ama de cães e, depois, como carpideira...
5*
O perseguidor
é um conto inspirado na vida do músico de jazz Charlie Parker. (Um conto muito extenso, com muito jazz, muita droga...perdi-me algures...)
2*
As armas secretas
as divagações de um jovem apaixonado que se questiona porque a namorada não permite que tenham relações sexuais. (Achei um pouco monótono.)
2*
Blow-up
é o título do filme de Antonioni, inspirado no conto Las Babas del Diablo.
Mais do que pela história subjacente - um fotógrafo que observa e fotografa três pessoas e que constrói o acontecimento através da análise da foto - o conto é fascinante pela originalidade do narrador, que intercala entre a primeira e a terceira pessoa. Muito curioso e interessante.
5*
As cartas da mãe
de como as ilusões, os sonhos, as mentiras, criados na mente servem para camuflar um casamento moribundo; para sobreviver à morte de um filho; para atenuar remorsos...
5*
Os bons serviços
é uma história divertida sobre uma senhora contratada como ama de cães e, depois, como carpideira...
5*
O perseguidor
é um conto inspirado na vida do músico de jazz Charlie Parker. (Um conto muito extenso, com muito jazz, muita droga...perdi-me algures...)
2*
As armas secretas
as divagações de um jovem apaixonado que se questiona porque a namorada não permite que tenham relações sexuais. (Achei um pouco monótono.)
2*
January 2, 2018
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5bb8...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017
There's gold for everyone in this amazing collection, showcasing some of Cortazar's best stories. Fans of the quirkier and more sinister tales might be put off by the more sprawling, epiphanic stories, and vice-versa, but what can you do - it's still a must read.
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017
There's gold for everyone in this amazing collection, showcasing some of Cortazar's best stories. Fans of the quirkier and more sinister tales might be put off by the more sprawling, epiphanic stories, and vice-versa, but what can you do - it's still a must read.
October 1, 2024
Sneaking suspicion that this and Bestiary (which I’ve been reading since October of last year) contain the exact same collection of stories. Nevertheless, this edition had a much, much better typeface and was absolutely thrilling!
June 11, 2018
A tiger stalking the house a young girl is holidaying in; middle-aged siblings who experience an enforced segregation in their home; a young man who cannot stop vomiting baby rabbits; a disaffected and drug-addled jazz musician via the eyes of his morose biographer-this is the rich tapestry from which Cortazar weaves his short stories, whether it be the lachrymose streets of Paris or the sultry neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, the constant theme which runs through Cortazar's novel is the limitless wonders of story-telling; at times playful and at others meditative, Cortazar's range is varied but brilliant.
The title story, on which Antonioni's famous film is based, in one of the stand out stories in the collection. In it the narrator believes he witnesses-and prevents-an attempted murder via the lens of his camera. Subjectivity is a central theme in Cortazar's novels; the reader is at the behest of the narrator, whose interpretation of the picture-if indeed any picture exists-or if the narrator exists outside of the mind of Cortazar and the reader (which of course he doesn't), Cortazar leaves it up to the reader to interpret whether the scene the narrator witness was indeed an attempted murder, or a harmless frolic, or just a mediocre snap-shot of a everyday scene with no special significance outside the paranoid ramblings of a mad-man. One suspects the readers interpretation may change as often as the colours of the clouds at the end of the story. This feeling pf unreliability spreads its way through the other stories; in 'Continuity of Parks' the reader is killed by the very murderer he is reading about, in 'The Idol of Cyclades' a Borgesian thriller in which the homicidal mad-man may not be the person the reader originally anticipates it being or in 'Bestiary' where a-perhaps real or perhaps imaginary tiger stalks the house and imagination of the narrator.
Whether it be a surreal story of a human-like fish or the obsessive love of a neurotic, Cortazar's short stories as wonderfully told and beautifully rendered snap-shots into the mind of a genius.
The title story, on which Antonioni's famous film is based, in one of the stand out stories in the collection. In it the narrator believes he witnesses-and prevents-an attempted murder via the lens of his camera. Subjectivity is a central theme in Cortazar's novels; the reader is at the behest of the narrator, whose interpretation of the picture-if indeed any picture exists-or if the narrator exists outside of the mind of Cortazar and the reader (which of course he doesn't), Cortazar leaves it up to the reader to interpret whether the scene the narrator witness was indeed an attempted murder, or a harmless frolic, or just a mediocre snap-shot of a everyday scene with no special significance outside the paranoid ramblings of a mad-man. One suspects the readers interpretation may change as often as the colours of the clouds at the end of the story. This feeling pf unreliability spreads its way through the other stories; in 'Continuity of Parks' the reader is killed by the very murderer he is reading about, in 'The Idol of Cyclades' a Borgesian thriller in which the homicidal mad-man may not be the person the reader originally anticipates it being or in 'Bestiary' where a-perhaps real or perhaps imaginary tiger stalks the house and imagination of the narrator.
Whether it be a surreal story of a human-like fish or the obsessive love of a neurotic, Cortazar's short stories as wonderfully told and beautifully rendered snap-shots into the mind of a genius.
November 3, 2017
Cortazar roman ve öyküyü karşılaştırırken "Düzyazı bir boks maçı gibidir, romanı puan alarak kazanabilirsiniz ama öyküde nakavt etmeniz gerekir" diyerek tercihini öyküden yana yapmış. Yıllar önce tercihini romandan yana yapmış benim gibi insanların öykülere ısınması içinse Cortazar gibi büyük öykücülere ihtiyaçları varmış.
Bu kitaptaki öyküleri unutmak istemiyorum. Bazılarını daha çok sevdim elbette ama hepsi de çarpıcı, eşsiz öyküler. Gerçekdışılık zorlamasız bir şekilde girivermiş bu öykülere, sanki herkesin hayatının bir döneminde yaşaması çok muhtemel olaylarmış gibi. Absürd ve fiziksel gerçeklik arasındaki sınır son derece geçirgen ve muğlâk. Okur olarak ne tarafta kalacağınız tamamen size kalmış.
Hoşuma giden bir diğer şey, aynı öyküde bakış açısının bir anda değişivermesi. Bu değişim okurun konforunu bozmadan öyle ustalıklı bir şekilde yapılıyor ki bir anda kendinizi öyküyü anlatanın sırtını izlerken buluyor ve buna şaşırmıyorsunuz.
Öyküleri kendime hatırlatmak adına aşağıdaki kısa özetleri yazdım. SPOILER içerir.
Gece Yüzü Yukarda – Motosiklet kazası geçiren adam hastanede tedavi olurken, uykuya daldığı anda kendisini Azteklerin Çiçek savaşında esir alınmış görür. Kurban etme töreninde, dört aztek rahibinin omuzları üzerinde, eli kolu bağlanmış olarak yüzü gökyüzüne dönük tapınağın merdivenlerinden çıkmaktadır. Gerçek hangisi, rüya hangisi?
Put – Üç arkeolog - Morand ve Teresa çifti ve Somoza- Ege denizi kıyılarında yaptıkları kazıda antik döneme ait bir ikona bulurlar. İkona’yı yetkililere teslim etmeyip gizlice kaçırırlar. Somoza’da kalan ikona zamanla adamda tutku haline gelir. İkona’nın kopyalarını yontmaya başladıkça geçmişle bağlantı kurar. Bir kurban etme töreni düzenlemesi gerekecektir. Fakat töreni düzenleyen kurban olacak ve ikona kendine yeni kurbanlar arayacak.
Axolotl – Paris’te bir hayvanat bahçesine gidip oradaki akvaryumun karşısında saatlerce günlerce kalıp kendini bir tür kertenkelenin larva hali olan Axolotl’la özdeşleştiren adamı anlatıyor. Adam öykü boyunca gerçekten Axolotl oluyor ve öykü kertenkelenin bakış açısından bitiyor.
Cinayeti Gördüm – Kitaba adına veren bu öyküde anlatıcı bir fotoğrafçıdır ve parkta orta yaşlı bir kadın ve genç bir çocuğun fotoğrafını gizlice çeker. Kadın ile fotoğrafçı arasında tartışma çıkar. Kadın fotonun filmlerini ister ama alamz. Adam fotoğrafı büyük boy tab ederek odasına asar ve karşısında saatlerce fotoğraftan yansıyan ihtimalleri düşünür. Her bakış açısından farklı farklı öyküler doğurur tek bir fotoğraf. Fotoğraf sanatına ilişkin çok çarpıcı tespitler var öyküde.
Bütün Parklar Uç Uca – Malikânesinin çalışma odasındaki rahat koltuğuna oturan adam roman okumaktadır. Romanda bir yasak aşk buluşması sahnesini okurken, roman kahramanı kendisini öldürmek üzere malikânenin arka kapısından girmektedir.
Oyunun Sonu – Bu öyküdeki tren yolu sahneleri yıllardır aklımdaydı. Nerde okuduğumu, hangi yazarın hangi kitabından olduğunu hiç hatırlamıyordum. Üç kız çocuğu her gün tren yoluna gidip heykelcilik oynuyorlar. İçlerinden biri, Letitia’nın kemik yapısıyla ilgili ağır bir hastalığı var. Bu nedenle hem aileleri tarafından hem de diğer iki çocuk tarafından kollanıyor, daha doğrusu nazı çekiliyor. Trenden onların oyununu izleyen bir çocuk tren camından mektup atıyor. “en güzeliniz en tembeliniz” diye. Oyun çocuğun onlarla tanışmak üzere bir sonraki istasyonda inmek istemesiyle bitiyor. Letitia çocukla buluşmaya gelmiyor ve bir mektup gönderiyor. Mektupta ne yazdığını asla öğrenemiyoruz. Acıklı bir şeyler olmalı. Öyküdeki oyun çok hoşuma gitmişti. Özellikle Letitia’nın vücudunu heykele dönüştürmekteki becerisi, diğer kızların ona şefkati ve sevgisi. Akıldan çıkmayacak bir öykü gerçekten.
Ele Geçirilen Ev - Aynı evde yaşayan iki kardeşin oturdukları eve endekslenmiş hayat rutinleri yavaş yavaş bozulmaya başlar. Önce arka bölümden sesler duyarlar ve evin o kısmının ele geçirildiğini anlarlar. Evin her tarafı yavaş yavaş ele geçirilirken iki kardeşin tek tepkisi evin kendilerine kalan kısmına tıkılıp yaşamaya çalışmak olur. Sonunda ev tamamen ele geçirilir ve iki kardeş evi terk ederler. Acayip bir öyküydü. Hayatlarımızın kimbilir kimler, kimbilir neler tarafından zapt edilmesi ve bireysel olaral küçücük alanlarımıza büzülerek belki de o en ufak köşelerimizden bile kovularak sona ermesi gibi. Sonra da sokaklara yani aslında kimseye ait olmayan, hiç de kişisel olayan genel geçer hayatlara savruluyoruz.
Bir Sarı Çiçek - Elli yaşlarında bir adam otobüste gördüğü küçük bir çocuğun kendisinin yeniden vücut bulmuş hali olduğuna takıntılı bir şekilde inanır. Çocuğu takip eder, evini öğrenir, ailesiyle bir şekilde dostluk kurar. Çocuk onun ölümsüzlüğünün kanıtıdır. Ama çocuk bronşitten öldüğünde adamın hipotezi çürümüştür. Sonra çiçeklere bakar ve o çiçeklerin kendisi için olduğunu, ölünce kendisi için hiç çiçek olayacağı gibi hiçlik düşünceleri sayıklar…(pek de sevmediğim bir öykü)
Uzaklıklar - Alina Reyes küçük yaşlardan beri, çok uzaklarda, Budapeşte’de yaşayan bir dilenci kadının hayatını duyumsamakta, acılarını hissetmektedir. Evlenince kocasına Budapeşte’ye gitmek istediğini söyler. Orda kendi başına yürüyüşe çıkar ve onu bulur. Asıl amacı ondan kurtulmaktır aslında. Ama köprünün üstünde birbirlerine sarıldıktan sonra Alina’nın vücudunu alıp giden dilenci kadın olur.
Gizli Silahlar - Küçükken bir nazi’nin tecavüzüne uğramış olan Michele erkek arkadaşı Piere’de tecavüzcünün ruhunu görür. Tecavüzcü nazi Michele’in arkadaşları tarafından öldürülmüştür ama Michele’in bundan haberi yoktur. Piere kız arkadaşının kendisiyle birlikte olmamasına çok sinirlenmekte ve böyle sinirlendikçe zihninden kendisini bile şaşırtan düşünceler ve küfürler geçmektedir.
Hizmetinizde - Yaşlı bir hizmetçi olan Madam Francinet’e bir parti sırasında köpeklere bakması karşılığında ödeme yapılacaktır. Parti bittiğinde madam Francinet aç, yorgun ve susamıştır. Ama kimsenin dikkatini çekmez. Yalnızca partide sona kalmış olan Bay Bebe onunla ilgilenip içkisini paylaşır. Madam Francinet adamın ilgisinden çok hoşlanmış ve duygulanmıştır. Aylar sonra bir cenazede meftanın annesi rolünü oynaması karşılığında para ödeneceği söylendiğinde kabul eder. Ölen güzel yüzlü genç Bay Bebe’dir ve madam Francinet’in rol yapmasına gerek yoktur.
Pariste Bir Genç Hanıma Mektuplar - Kısa süreliğine bir arkadaşının evinde kalan adamın çok değişik bir özelliği vardır. Gerginleşince tavşan kusmaktadır. Tavşanları bir süre besleyip yeterli büyüklüğe gelince de çiftliğe vermektedir. Ancak arkadaşının evinde kalırken kustuğu 10 tavşanı dolapta beslemeye başlar. Tavşanların varlığını evin hizmetçisinden gizlemek için bir rutin oluşturur. Tavşanlar büyüdükçe evdeki düzen tamamen bozulacak, adam başa çıkamayacaktır. On birinci tavşanı kustuğunda artık arkadaşına evin mahvından bahseder.
Bu keyifli öyküde adamın, tavşanları yaratıp sonra da onların gelişimini, çoğalmalarını izlemesinde tansrısallık vardı. Tavşanlar büyüyor, çoğalıyor ve daha yıkıcı oluyorlar. Adamsa bütün bunları engelleyebilir ama engellemiyor.
Canavar Masalı - Isabel ailesi tarafından yaz tatilini geçirmek üzere kırsaldaki bir ailenin çiftliğine gönderilir. Bu çiftlikteki günlük hayat “kaplan”ın o anda nerde olduğuna göre düzenlenir. İçlerinden biri gelip haber verir “Kaplan çalışma odasında” o zaman çalışma odasına girilmeyecektir. Çiftliğin hanımı Rema, hüzünlü bir kadındır. Kocasının kardeşi Velet, küçük Nino’ya şiddet uygularken, Rema’yı da taciz etmektedir. Rema’nın kocası Luis iyi bir adamdır ama sürekli çalışma odasında kapanıp kitap okumakta, evle ilgilenmemektedir. Isabel bir gün Kaplan’ın yerini bilerek yanlış söyler ve Kaplan Velet’i öldürür.
Bu kitaptaki öyküleri unutmak istemiyorum. Bazılarını daha çok sevdim elbette ama hepsi de çarpıcı, eşsiz öyküler. Gerçekdışılık zorlamasız bir şekilde girivermiş bu öykülere, sanki herkesin hayatının bir döneminde yaşaması çok muhtemel olaylarmış gibi. Absürd ve fiziksel gerçeklik arasındaki sınır son derece geçirgen ve muğlâk. Okur olarak ne tarafta kalacağınız tamamen size kalmış.
Hoşuma giden bir diğer şey, aynı öyküde bakış açısının bir anda değişivermesi. Bu değişim okurun konforunu bozmadan öyle ustalıklı bir şekilde yapılıyor ki bir anda kendinizi öyküyü anlatanın sırtını izlerken buluyor ve buna şaşırmıyorsunuz.
Öyküleri kendime hatırlatmak adına aşağıdaki kısa özetleri yazdım. SPOILER içerir.
Gece Yüzü Yukarda – Motosiklet kazası geçiren adam hastanede tedavi olurken, uykuya daldığı anda kendisini Azteklerin Çiçek savaşında esir alınmış görür. Kurban etme töreninde, dört aztek rahibinin omuzları üzerinde, eli kolu bağlanmış olarak yüzü gökyüzüne dönük tapınağın merdivenlerinden çıkmaktadır. Gerçek hangisi, rüya hangisi?
Put – Üç arkeolog - Morand ve Teresa çifti ve Somoza- Ege denizi kıyılarında yaptıkları kazıda antik döneme ait bir ikona bulurlar. İkona’yı yetkililere teslim etmeyip gizlice kaçırırlar. Somoza’da kalan ikona zamanla adamda tutku haline gelir. İkona’nın kopyalarını yontmaya başladıkça geçmişle bağlantı kurar. Bir kurban etme töreni düzenlemesi gerekecektir. Fakat töreni düzenleyen kurban olacak ve ikona kendine yeni kurbanlar arayacak.
Axolotl – Paris’te bir hayvanat bahçesine gidip oradaki akvaryumun karşısında saatlerce günlerce kalıp kendini bir tür kertenkelenin larva hali olan Axolotl’la özdeşleştiren adamı anlatıyor. Adam öykü boyunca gerçekten Axolotl oluyor ve öykü kertenkelenin bakış açısından bitiyor.
Cinayeti Gördüm – Kitaba adına veren bu öyküde anlatıcı bir fotoğrafçıdır ve parkta orta yaşlı bir kadın ve genç bir çocuğun fotoğrafını gizlice çeker. Kadın ile fotoğrafçı arasında tartışma çıkar. Kadın fotonun filmlerini ister ama alamz. Adam fotoğrafı büyük boy tab ederek odasına asar ve karşısında saatlerce fotoğraftan yansıyan ihtimalleri düşünür. Her bakış açısından farklı farklı öyküler doğurur tek bir fotoğraf. Fotoğraf sanatına ilişkin çok çarpıcı tespitler var öyküde.
Bütün Parklar Uç Uca – Malikânesinin çalışma odasındaki rahat koltuğuna oturan adam roman okumaktadır. Romanda bir yasak aşk buluşması sahnesini okurken, roman kahramanı kendisini öldürmek üzere malikânenin arka kapısından girmektedir.
Oyunun Sonu – Bu öyküdeki tren yolu sahneleri yıllardır aklımdaydı. Nerde okuduğumu, hangi yazarın hangi kitabından olduğunu hiç hatırlamıyordum. Üç kız çocuğu her gün tren yoluna gidip heykelcilik oynuyorlar. İçlerinden biri, Letitia’nın kemik yapısıyla ilgili ağır bir hastalığı var. Bu nedenle hem aileleri tarafından hem de diğer iki çocuk tarafından kollanıyor, daha doğrusu nazı çekiliyor. Trenden onların oyununu izleyen bir çocuk tren camından mektup atıyor. “en güzeliniz en tembeliniz” diye. Oyun çocuğun onlarla tanışmak üzere bir sonraki istasyonda inmek istemesiyle bitiyor. Letitia çocukla buluşmaya gelmiyor ve bir mektup gönderiyor. Mektupta ne yazdığını asla öğrenemiyoruz. Acıklı bir şeyler olmalı. Öyküdeki oyun çok hoşuma gitmişti. Özellikle Letitia’nın vücudunu heykele dönüştürmekteki becerisi, diğer kızların ona şefkati ve sevgisi. Akıldan çıkmayacak bir öykü gerçekten.
Ele Geçirilen Ev - Aynı evde yaşayan iki kardeşin oturdukları eve endekslenmiş hayat rutinleri yavaş yavaş bozulmaya başlar. Önce arka bölümden sesler duyarlar ve evin o kısmının ele geçirildiğini anlarlar. Evin her tarafı yavaş yavaş ele geçirilirken iki kardeşin tek tepkisi evin kendilerine kalan kısmına tıkılıp yaşamaya çalışmak olur. Sonunda ev tamamen ele geçirilir ve iki kardeş evi terk ederler. Acayip bir öyküydü. Hayatlarımızın kimbilir kimler, kimbilir neler tarafından zapt edilmesi ve bireysel olaral küçücük alanlarımıza büzülerek belki de o en ufak köşelerimizden bile kovularak sona ermesi gibi. Sonra da sokaklara yani aslında kimseye ait olmayan, hiç de kişisel olayan genel geçer hayatlara savruluyoruz.
Bir Sarı Çiçek - Elli yaşlarında bir adam otobüste gördüğü küçük bir çocuğun kendisinin yeniden vücut bulmuş hali olduğuna takıntılı bir şekilde inanır. Çocuğu takip eder, evini öğrenir, ailesiyle bir şekilde dostluk kurar. Çocuk onun ölümsüzlüğünün kanıtıdır. Ama çocuk bronşitten öldüğünde adamın hipotezi çürümüştür. Sonra çiçeklere bakar ve o çiçeklerin kendisi için olduğunu, ölünce kendisi için hiç çiçek olayacağı gibi hiçlik düşünceleri sayıklar…(pek de sevmediğim bir öykü)
Uzaklıklar - Alina Reyes küçük yaşlardan beri, çok uzaklarda, Budapeşte’de yaşayan bir dilenci kadının hayatını duyumsamakta, acılarını hissetmektedir. Evlenince kocasına Budapeşte’ye gitmek istediğini söyler. Orda kendi başına yürüyüşe çıkar ve onu bulur. Asıl amacı ondan kurtulmaktır aslında. Ama köprünün üstünde birbirlerine sarıldıktan sonra Alina’nın vücudunu alıp giden dilenci kadın olur.
Gizli Silahlar - Küçükken bir nazi’nin tecavüzüne uğramış olan Michele erkek arkadaşı Piere’de tecavüzcünün ruhunu görür. Tecavüzcü nazi Michele’in arkadaşları tarafından öldürülmüştür ama Michele’in bundan haberi yoktur. Piere kız arkadaşının kendisiyle birlikte olmamasına çok sinirlenmekte ve böyle sinirlendikçe zihninden kendisini bile şaşırtan düşünceler ve küfürler geçmektedir.
Hizmetinizde - Yaşlı bir hizmetçi olan Madam Francinet’e bir parti sırasında köpeklere bakması karşılığında ödeme yapılacaktır. Parti bittiğinde madam Francinet aç, yorgun ve susamıştır. Ama kimsenin dikkatini çekmez. Yalnızca partide sona kalmış olan Bay Bebe onunla ilgilenip içkisini paylaşır. Madam Francinet adamın ilgisinden çok hoşlanmış ve duygulanmıştır. Aylar sonra bir cenazede meftanın annesi rolünü oynaması karşılığında para ödeneceği söylendiğinde kabul eder. Ölen güzel yüzlü genç Bay Bebe’dir ve madam Francinet’in rol yapmasına gerek yoktur.
Pariste Bir Genç Hanıma Mektuplar - Kısa süreliğine bir arkadaşının evinde kalan adamın çok değişik bir özelliği vardır. Gerginleşince tavşan kusmaktadır. Tavşanları bir süre besleyip yeterli büyüklüğe gelince de çiftliğe vermektedir. Ancak arkadaşının evinde kalırken kustuğu 10 tavşanı dolapta beslemeye başlar. Tavşanların varlığını evin hizmetçisinden gizlemek için bir rutin oluşturur. Tavşanlar büyüdükçe evdeki düzen tamamen bozulacak, adam başa çıkamayacaktır. On birinci tavşanı kustuğunda artık arkadaşına evin mahvından bahseder.
Bu keyifli öyküde adamın, tavşanları yaratıp sonra da onların gelişimini, çoğalmalarını izlemesinde tansrısallık vardı. Tavşanlar büyüyor, çoğalıyor ve daha yıkıcı oluyorlar. Adamsa bütün bunları engelleyebilir ama engellemiyor.
Canavar Masalı - Isabel ailesi tarafından yaz tatilini geçirmek üzere kırsaldaki bir ailenin çiftliğine gönderilir. Bu çiftlikteki günlük hayat “kaplan”ın o anda nerde olduğuna göre düzenlenir. İçlerinden biri gelip haber verir “Kaplan çalışma odasında” o zaman çalışma odasına girilmeyecektir. Çiftliğin hanımı Rema, hüzünlü bir kadındır. Kocasının kardeşi Velet, küçük Nino’ya şiddet uygularken, Rema’yı da taciz etmektedir. Rema’nın kocası Luis iyi bir adamdır ama sürekli çalışma odasında kapanıp kitap okumakta, evle ilgilenmemektedir. Isabel bir gün Kaplan’ın yerini bilerek yanlış söyler ve Kaplan Velet’i öldürür.
May 24, 2018
نکته: ریویوهاتونو قبل سند زدن کپی کنین که مث من نشین!
ریویو:
داستانهای آمریکای لاتین همیشه خوبن!
بورخساش که محشر بود. از بولانیو هم یکی داشت که خیلی عالی بود. یه سری داستانک کوتاه هم داشت که اونا هم ایدههای جدیدی داشتن. با کورتاسار آشنا شدم و داستان آگراندیسماناش که اونم عالی بود.
یه داستان هم بود درباره پلیکانها که خیلی جالب بود!
ریویو:
داستانهای آمریکای لاتین همیشه خوبن!
بورخساش که محشر بود. از بولانیو هم یکی داشت که خیلی عالی بود. یه سری داستانک کوتاه هم داشت که اونا هم ایدههای جدیدی داشتن. با کورتاسار آشنا شدم و داستان آگراندیسماناش که اونم عالی بود.
یه داستان هم بود درباره پلیکانها که خیلی جالب بود!
June 21, 2020
I've read it long ago, but still struggle the best way to review it. For now suffice to say that it contains two of my favourite stories by him: "Blow-Up" and "The Pursuer". Both are spellbinding and deserve separate reviews.
January 21, 2009
While reading this book, I turned into the book, but remained myself looking at the book looking at me. Then I threw up a bunny who, it turns out, is creeping up behind me as I write these wor-
February 13, 2010
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the story "Axolotl". When I envied those rhythms, their faint movements, those sentences in particular, intimate, slightly illogical, thought-like vectors achieving a rolling quality that is not like a sentence at all. Yes, above all I envied Cortazar's sentences, which are unique in their grammatical messiness, their organic connections, the imperceptible consequences of unfolding. Those days I read "Axolotl" obsessively, drunk on the sound of "Ambystoma", "Port Royal", and "an indifferent immobility", sometimes three or four times a day, captured by that minute looking, that description in which the words are just a cake of dust upon what is actually a chthonic--slow--turning over and over. Often I would drift off while reading, and they would enter my dreams, the axolotls and the sentences both, together.
"Axolotl" is probably the best story in this collection. The sentences are what I fell in love with first, but Cortazar is preoccupied with other notions. With the idea of becoming the Other, switching identities, with time, with perception. Most of these concepts, dare I say it, are weights that hinder his gifts, yes sometimes even gimmicks. Once you read one story, you begin to see the pattern and start looking for it, which is incredibly distracting, especially when you're trying to focus your eyes on those mysterious sentences at the bottom of the tank. But the particulars, that is where these stories sit implacable, where the concept cannot infringe. I insist that these stories do not need to be weighed down by such concepts, that they should live alone at the level of the sentence, that they need to be freed from the constraints of expectation.
"Axolotl" is probably the best story in this collection. The sentences are what I fell in love with first, but Cortazar is preoccupied with other notions. With the idea of becoming the Other, switching identities, with time, with perception. Most of these concepts, dare I say it, are weights that hinder his gifts, yes sometimes even gimmicks. Once you read one story, you begin to see the pattern and start looking for it, which is incredibly distracting, especially when you're trying to focus your eyes on those mysterious sentences at the bottom of the tank. But the particulars, that is where these stories sit implacable, where the concept cannot infringe. I insist that these stories do not need to be weighed down by such concepts, that they should live alone at the level of the sentence, that they need to be freed from the constraints of expectation.
September 19, 2016
I had the same problem with this book that I've had with most of the short story collections I've read the last few years. I really liked the first stories, but then it only went downhill. I'm almost starting to suspect that this is a conscious strategy - putting the best works first, and then just filling up the rest.
I bought this book solely because of the story "Continuity of Parks", the only thing I had previously read by Cortazar. In only two pages it can be said to contain everything a whole novel contains, and it plays with different narrative levels, bringing the reading main character into the narrative he is reading about in a wonderfully surreal way that I just love.
It was because of this story, and because Cortazar is often compared to Borges, that I wanted to read more by him. And don't get me wrong - there were some stories that I really enjoyed here, like "Axolotl", "House Taken Over" and "The Night Face Up". These were wonderfully surreal, yet easy to follow - just what I was looking for.
But it is extra disappointing when a book that starts out so well, ends up with a long stretch of stories that are just ok.
I bought this book solely because of the story "Continuity of Parks", the only thing I had previously read by Cortazar. In only two pages it can be said to contain everything a whole novel contains, and it plays with different narrative levels, bringing the reading main character into the narrative he is reading about in a wonderfully surreal way that I just love.
It was because of this story, and because Cortazar is often compared to Borges, that I wanted to read more by him. And don't get me wrong - there were some stories that I really enjoyed here, like "Axolotl", "House Taken Over" and "The Night Face Up". These were wonderfully surreal, yet easy to follow - just what I was looking for.
But it is extra disappointing when a book that starts out so well, ends up with a long stretch of stories that are just ok.
July 19, 2014
Cortazar's craft as a short story writer is staggering. Even when I wasn't completely engaged by the characters and situations, it was hard not to be blown away by his sinuous, rhythmic way of turning sentences. Like Borges, he operates in a territory where time and memory bleed in and out of each other, where reality flirts with the surreal, the magical and the menacing but is still grounded by the concrete, charmed details of everyday existence. I can't think of many things as utterly mesmerizing as "axoltol" or "continuity of parks" and even the longer ones, while not quite as mysterious or fabulistic, are still beautifully odd and evocative. It's not Hopscotch, but at its best these are still mostly wonderful.
June 25, 2016
Well, shit. Now I have to change my opinion of Cortazar. These stories, at least toward the beginning of this collection are in a vein quite separate from that of Hopscotch, a book I loathed. And as much perverse pleasure as I've gotten out of poo-pooing that novel, I know now that at some point I'm going to have to give it a second chance. This was just too good.
I'm fairly sure that in every picture I've seen of Borges, he's wearing a suit. Imagine that old gentlemen instead in flip-flops and a greasy t-shirt, and you might have some kind of metaphor for the way Cortazar writes. Our friend Cortazar is a lot looser with his language, but often that same Borgesian cosmic weight is felt in his work. I'm not particularly adept at describing prose, so I'll just say it's good. Really good. This was just too good.
I'm fairly sure that in every picture I've seen of Borges, he's wearing a suit. Imagine that old gentlemen instead in flip-flops and a greasy t-shirt, and you might have some kind of metaphor for the way Cortazar writes. Our friend Cortazar is a lot looser with his language, but often that same Borgesian cosmic weight is felt in his work. I'm not particularly adept at describing prose, so I'll just say it's good. Really good. This was just too good.
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