Customer Reviews

62: A Model Kit

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The way in is through a looking-glass that is also a vampire-haunted castle and at the sa e time a city that is all cities. Be forewarned that once you have entered the Zone, you will never completely leave it. You will find yourself in its shadowed galleries, its furtive plazas, its unpredictable elevators, from time to time for the rest of your life. You will ask questions that will never be answered (what was inside the doll?) and you will be haunted by a realization that important things are always happening just outside your understanding. Cortazar invented the interactive book in Hopscotch, another highly disturbing expedition into parallel reality, but 62: A Model Kit is his masterpiece. Here is a writer admired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda and Carlos Fuentes (who once wrote, "Anyone who does not read Cortazar is doomed") but has been deeply neglected in North America. Other writers talk about alternative realities; Cortazar opens the door.

62: A Model Kit is ably translated from Spanish for an English reading audience by Gregory Rebassa and is a novel of fantasy, comedy, cities, snatches of conversations, brief meetings, characters whose lives begin at any moment and end in intense, brilliant encounters with others on a train, poignant love making, and even restaurant dining. The construction is free and open, devoid of the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order and take the reader on a daring and exciting new approach to life itself. 62: A Model Kit written so deftly and daringly by the late Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) is enthusiastically recommended reading for anyone with an interest in pushing the literary envelope as exemplified by the format of the novel.

Cortázar never tells a story directly, instead he dances around, weaving an intricate web of words, images, allusions - what later crystallizes into a coherent story.

Jumping-around Jazz-like narrative.

To summarize this book would be to discredit it. It must be read by anyone who is interested in the quirks and subtleties that haunt human action. It is not intended as a book of horror, or a humorous book for that matter, but this is what one will find in the most honest and purest sense of the words. The author would be scandalized by the application of such sentimental terms, but as I am not Mr. Cortazar, I am afraid this is the best I can do.

This book builds to less then nothing (for nothing can sometimes actually be exciting). Cortazar is impressive, no doubt, but his stuff is at its core is just gimmicks and mindtricks. No real substance. He writes like someone merely trying to impress his peers in his creative writing class, and maybe get laid by that cute girl in the corner. To say he influenced writers like Marquez elevates him too much. Marquez likely saw what Cortazar lacked and built on it from there. Fun to read like it's fun watching a magician, but that's as far as it goes.