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Blow-Up: And Other Stories, by Julio Cortazar
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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.
- Sales Rank: #75470 in Books
- Brand: Cortazar, Julio
- Published on: 1985-02-12
- Released on: 1985-02-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.20" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
Praise for Blow-Up and Other Stories:
"[Cortazar] is a unique storyteller. He can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night."
—Time
"Julio Cortazar is a stunning writer. It is difficult to imagine how he could improve as a writer of short stories."
—The Christian Science Monitor
"A glittering showcase for a daring talent . . . Julio Cortazar is a dazzler."
—William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle
"A first-class literary imagination at work."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Cortazar displays throughout his stories the ability to elevate them above the condition of those gimmicky tales which depend for effect soley on a twist ending. His genius here lies in the knack for constructing striking, artistically 'right' subordinate circumstances out of which his fantastic and metaphysical whimsies appear normally to spring."
—Saturday Review
Language Notes
Text: English, Spanish (translation)
From the Inside Flap
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 stories collected here -- including "Blow-Up; ' on which Antonioni based his film -- Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible. This is the most brilliant and celebrated book of short stories by a master of the form.
Most helpful customer reviews
59 of 59 people found the following review helpful.
A marvelous collection of short stories -- but what makes them so is not easy to explain
By Odysseus
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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By bob phoenix
Parker fans will love the long jazz story.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Literature at the Planck Scale
By Amazon Customer
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.
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