Bring Back Cortázar


"Sometimes I think the only thing we did in school was read Julio Cortázar. I remember taking tests on 'The Night Face Up' in each of my last three years of school, and countless were the times we read 'Axolotl' and 'The Continuity of Parks,' two short stories that the teachers considered ideal for filling out an hour and a half of class. This is not a complaint, since we were happy reading Cortázar: we recited the characteristics of the fantasy genre with automatic joy, and we repeated in chorus that for Cortázar the short story wins by knockout and the novel by points, and that there was a male reader and a female reader and all of that. The tastes of my generation were shaped by Cortázar’s stories, and not even the xeroxed tests could divest his literature of that air of permanent contemporaneity. ..."
The Paris Review

2011 November: Blow-Up (1966) - Michelangelo Antonioni, 2016 March: Cronopios and Famas (1969), 2017 October: Julio Cortázar, The Art of Fiction No. 83

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