Customer Reviews

Unreasonable Hours (Passport Books)

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For this tiny volume of stories, I feel most of all a frequent hunger to reread. This collection provides a fine introduction to Cortazar's writing, for those who do not want to dive into Hopscotch or The Blow-Up without evidence of the author's skill to turn tales. There are two stories in this volume that I utterly love. The one presents a rather twisted world of the late high school or early university years. Two brave students seek their teachers after hours and gain access to a nearly diabolical cabal. The characters uneasily force reactions to the curious, new circumstances. The other story, hauntingly memorable for me, I would rank among my favorite short stories. The violence of street gangs and political malcontents overlaps with the domestic life of a family attempting to nurse one of its own out of a coma. The boundary shared by the private and political in these stories is subtly and subversively sketched. The importance of some stability and justice in both realms, despite the incursions of the irrational and unjust, Cortazar communicates thoughtfully within stories that do not for a second wink disingenuosly or evoke the repugnance that some more abrasively political fictions and less gloriously delightful might.

each story in this book leaves your head spinning, forces you to put down the book and think

In the <i>Don't blame anyone</i>, the simple act of putting on a sweater becomes the ultimate nightmare, tension rising to an impossible level and releasing, "12 floors down"... This book is short, but on shouldn't rush reading through. Instead, one should sit still for a minute (or hour - or a day, for that matter) and think... Unreasonable Hours is a wonderfully eary description of 'it can happen to you'