Customer Reviews

Blow Up and Other Stories

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

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

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

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

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

To take but a few cases in point:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julio Cortazar reminds me more of the late great Spanish film director, Luis Bunuel, one of the founding fathers of Surrealism, who once remarked that, when writing a film, he always aimed for whatever was most disturbing in any given situation. Similarly, Cortazar's stories are all constructed around a disturbing vision. In "The End of the Game," for instance, three children don bizarre costumes and assume attitudes for the passengers on the trains that zip by them.

"Blow-Up" is very different from Antonioni's film. There is a menace in the interplay between the photographer, his unwitting subjects, and a third party who was watching both.

My favorite story in the collection is "The Pursuer," a nakedly brilliant study of a black American Jazz musician and the critic who never quite understands the demons that give birth to the music. The story is dedicated to Ch. P., who I assume is Charley Parker. Cortazar's musician lives on the edge and is plagued by disturbing visions as he spirals down into a personal apocalypse. The critic, on the other hand, tries ineffectually to help the musician, but is more worried about what people will say about his latest study of the musician's work.

Cortazar's stories take place in a kind of half-European, half-Latin Neverland. Born in Belgium of Argentinian parents, he spent most of his life in Europe. It is as if the author's self-exile gave birth to a demon of restlessness that possessed his characters.

Although this is the first Cortazar I have read, it will not be the last.

Julio Cortazar is a revolutionary but one far from home and not a political revolutionary but one that roams the further reaches of the psyche, just beyond where civilization says it is safe to go. Every single one of his many short stories is worth reading(so, if available, get all of them). His novels I find too experimental and mired in his theories but in the short story he shines like very few others. Some of his best are told through a childs perspective and all of his shorter fictions in a way take you into that kind of place where wonder still outweighs any learned way of seeing "reality" which in Cortazar is always in quotes. Cortazar likes to take you out of your normal context and give you a whole new set of associations, a whole new world to walk in. His novels are difficult but his stories are not. They invite the best kinds of speculation but they can also be appreciated at a glance. Cortazar is reputed to have had a very large record collection, mostly jazz, in his Paris lair in the sixties. I think he is one of those authors who would have been very interesting to know. Hip to the way peoples perception of the world were changing at the time, but persistent in his personal quests which led him down many strange avenues. To this his stories will attest. A note: Cortazar is sometimes grouped in with Borges and there are some good reasons why but I prefer Cortazar. Both play games with logic but Cortazar pleases both the mind and the emotions. The effect is more subtle.

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

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

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

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

-David Alston

There is an often obsessive, dreamlike quality to the writing of Julio Cortazár, and this quality is typically conveyed through the most prosaic and plausible details.

Cortazár, an Argentinean, was born in Brussels in 1914, raised in Buenos Aires, and spent most of his career in Paris, where he died in 1984. He wrote with an exile's knowledge of the transitional and malleable characteristics of identity and reality, and this is one of the major themes of the stories contained in this classic collection translated by the poet, Paul Blackburn.

A cosmopolitan and international literary figure in his lifetime, Cortazár was influenced by Poe, the French Symbolists, and the Surrealists, and he shared with them a penchant for subject matter of a mysterious and metaphysical nature, and a pronounced radical outlook. What set him apart were the highly credible, even mundane situations and circumstances that he invented in his stories as springboards to the fantastic.

Take, for example, the story that lends its title to this collection, and to Michaelangelo Antonioni's celebrated film that it inspired, "Blow-Up." In Cortazár's original story, set in Paris, (not Swinging London, as in the film), the protagonist is a translator and amateur photographer, who observes a young woman and an adolescent boy in a public square, and casually shoots the scene with his Contax 1.1.2. He later develops the film, enlarges the picture, and by studying the blow-up surmises that the woman was attempting to seduce the boy for an older man sitting in a nearby car.

The photographic scene, and the botched assignation it depicts, encroaches on the photographer's life, and he speaks of himself both in the fist person and third persons in the story. "Nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I'm seeing," he says, "Or if, simply I'm telling a truth which is only my truth." As the photographer is a translator by trade, the statement increases in complexity and levels of meaning.

(In his film version, Antonioni borrowed the story's theme of "appearance versus reality," and wove from it an open-ended murder mystery. It is fascinating to read phrases from this very different story, and to see how they were reinterpreted and re-imagined in the Italian director's first English language film.)

Another story, "Axolotl," is told by a human narrator who so identifies with the axolotls (the larval stage of a certain species of salamander) in an aquarium that he actually becomes an axolotl. The character does not assume his non-human identity dramatically as the character Gregor Samsa does in Kafka's "Metamorphosis," but rather through a process of protracted observation and empathy with these languid creatures. In the course of the story he speaks of humans and axolotls in both the first person and third persons.

This story hints at the covert political content of Cortazár's writing of this period, and it is not too much of a stretch to interpret this transition from human to non-human, and active to motionless creature as a veiled critique of political inaction and social conformity--maybe even that of the exile's position of distance and non-engagement.

The other thirteen tales in the collection are each distinguished by their own exquisite details, absurd reality, and plausible implausibility.

In the end, it seems unfair to marginalize Cortazár as a "Latin American Writer," (or "Magic Realist"), and the labels seems as inadequate and imprecise as tagging Joyce an "Irish Writer," or Nabokov a "Russian Writer." Like these other literary exiles, Cortazár invented his own worlds, and created a singular oeuvre universal in its themes, and unique in its imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

Julio Cortazar is probably one of the best writers of short fiction! I found a collection of his writing by accident years ago while looking through the latin american writers (I was obsessed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) I think that anyone would find his haunting characters and facinating story lines to be some of the most compelling in modern literature.

His stories are what I believe would happen if Ray bradbury were to write as beautifully and as mysteriously as J. D. Salinger.

JC is a fantastic writer. I love his material, and have read his work extensively in spanish during my years living in Argentina. I recently bought Blow-up and Other Stories, and was disappointed to find that the translation was terrible. It was very disjointed, and I even thought there were some gramatical errors . It detracted considerably from the story, and the enjoyment of reading. I realise that the style of writing is difficult to translate, but I'm sure it is possible.

Are there other translations of the book? Is there a review planned for the present version?

Regards

James

Cortazar is one of my favorite writers, and I bought this intending it as a gift for a friend of mine who cannot read Spanish. Unfortunately, I will have to find another gift, because this translation is going right back to Amazon.

The translation is awful. Specifically, the flow of the English is choppy and is full of direct translations from Spanish idioms that sound awkward. The translator fails to convey the brilliantly chatty and colloquial style in which Cortazar wrote in Spanish.

This basically reads like the translator, Paul Blackburn, was being paid by the page and cared nothing for the text that he was translating. This is not unlikely; the translation dates from 1967, long before anyone knew that Cortazar would end up being one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. The fact that the translator's name does not ever appear on the cover of the latest edition attests to the fact that even the publisher is aware of the bad quality of his work.

If you want to read Cortazar, look elsewhere! Something by a different translator, I'd say. One of the masters of the Spanish prose does not deserve to be read like this.