Recently I was reading about a group of Soviet dissidents who were arrested in Ukraine in the 60s. They were then sent to forced labor camps, where they were starved and tortured; some of them committed suicide. I’ve read plenty of similar accounts. But having also recently read Cortazar’s ‘The Night Face Up’, I thought for a few minutes, from the comfort of a chair in Barnes and Noble, about what it might be like to live for, say, three decades, a life of relative comfort, with mostly an abstract understanding of evil and suffering, and to then be imprisoned, starved and tortured, and to know that this was probably all the future held. I also wondered, during those same few minutes, about what exactly separates me from such a fate. Certainly not my own merit. And no one’s lack of merit could possibly make them ‘deserve’ what happened to the people I read about; not in any cosmology that I approve of, anyway. Since I’m not religious, the best guess I can offer is chance. Part of what I think the stories in Blow-Up suggest is that the dividing line is more porous than you might think. Actually, no, it’s not that it’s porous, it’s that there is no line; that the difference is just a matter of perception, of subjectivity. In Cortazar’s stories, perception is extremely fragile, and subject to change. My ordinary perception and relative sanity tell me, for example, that I’m far, far removed from the possibility of being ritualistically sacrificed to an Aztec god. I’m protected from this by the passage of time, the structure of modern civilization, etc. But in these stories, there’s a suggestion that, because such experiences have happened, we somehow all have access to them; we are all susceptible to them.If that sounds stupid or distasteful, or like an acid revelation, that’s fine. But these stories are not logical arguments; they render and dramatize anxieties that, I think, have a basis in reality. And if you think Cortazar sounds like an Innie as opposed to an Outie, you’re right. Cortazar is about consciousness and subjectivity. He’s fascinated by the nature of perception; by the idea of a consciousness observing itself, commenting on itself, being preoccupied while simultaneously the ‘real world’ continues on, ‘outside’, and the impossibility of its knowing or understanding itself. Take the jazz player in ‘The Pursuer’, for example, who wonders how it is that he can relate a story about his childhood in 2 minutes, when the detail and description should have taken him at least a quarter of an hour, or this passage from Hopscotch, that I’ve always found very beautiful: When you wake up, with the remains of a paradise half-seen in dreams hanging down over you…You fall inward, while you brush your teeth you really are a diver into washbasins…and you let yourself go in the hope that you’ll return to the other thing, to what you were before you woke up, and it’s still floating around, is still inside you, is you yourself…you fall inward for a moment, until the defenses of wakefulness, language, take charge and stop you. That’s part of Cortazar’s skill, I think; that he can render the experience of consciousness in such detail; in a way that many other writers wouldn’t think of or want to. But it's possible that since I read that passage, I've never experienced standing at a sink after waking up in exactly the same way.The prose in Blow-Up is not always as impressive or beautiful as in Hopscotch, but many of the stories are just as wild, funny and horrific as that book is. Hopscotch is a book that I’ve never really recommended to friends though, and I don’t think I could recommend it to those who work 40(+)-hour weeks at demanding jobs. If you are an unemployed bachelor tormented by the thought that you didn’t, in college, delve deeply enough into the nature of reality? Sure. Blow-Up, however, is less excessive and more accessible. A few of the stories, in my opinion, including "Axolotl", which a lot of reviewers here seem to like, are kind of silly, but my favorites are "The Idol of the Cyclades", "A Yellow Flower", "End of the Game", "The Pursuer" and "Secret Weapons." It’s also hard to suggest a writer that’s similar to Cortazar. The GoodReads description of Hopscotch says “The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris…” Well, Cortazar and Miller both lived in Paris as foreigners, that's true; they are both erudite, intelligent, playful, prone to digression; they are both Innies…I began this sentence intending to include a ‘but’, but okay, I guess there is some similarity. The first writer that came to my mind however, at least as I was reading these stories, was Philip K. Dick. And I started to imagine, as I read, a previously unreleased season of The Twilight Zone, which would feature episodes written by Cortazar, Dick, and others. Oh well.
The stories in this marvelous collection are divided into three numbered sections and were drawn from three different anthologies first published in Spanish. The first stories, section one and the beginning of section two, are magnificently surreal—a man watches axolotls (a Mexican salamander) at the aquarium with an intensity that results in the man becoming the axolotl who is watching a man at the zoo; three archaeologists steal an idol from a Greek excavation site and first one, then another become obsessed with its worship; a man staying at a friend’s apartment has a problem: he vomits bunnies until they take over the apartment; a household that tries to co-exist with a wild tiger in residence (everyone must check on the tiger’s whereabouts before leaving one room for another); a man seeking to relax of an evening with a good murder mystery becomes the novel’s victim (like a nightmare you’d think he would only need to stop reading). The later stories are longer, less surreal but no less imaginative than the first ones. I think they are even richer, more complex, and provocative in the end than the surreal ones. “The Pursuer,” a long story about a jazz musician trying to battle demons that include drug addicition, “At Your Service,” about a village woman who provides domestic services for her wealthy neighbors that evolve from spoiled dog-sitting to pretending to be the mother of a dead friend of her patrons, the title story (probably elevated to that status by the film’s fame) about a photographer whose picture of a boy and a woman interrupts a scam, but recognizes it as only an interruption, and “Secret Weapons,” a story about two lovers with a violent secret, a rape, a murder, that leaves them no peace. Cortazar is a masterful writer and these stories are elegant exercises in the limits, fully exploited, and possibilities, expanded to the breaking point, of narrative, shifting person and perspective, manipulating memory and imagination to magical effect. Read them once and you will read them again.
Do You like book Blow-Up And Other Stories (1985)?
Cortazar's craft as a short story writer is staggering. Even when I wasn't completely engaged by the characters and situations, it was hard not to be blown away by his sinuous, rhythmic way of turning sentences. Like Borges, he operates in a territory where time and memory bleed in and out of each other, where reality flirts with the surreal, the magical and the menacing but is still grounded by the concrete, charmed details of everyday existence. I can't think of many things as utterly mesmerizing as "axoltol" or "continuity of parks" and even the longer ones, while not quite as mysterious or fabulistic, are still beautifully odd and evocative. It's not Hopscotch, but at its best these are still mostly wonderful.
—Jeremy
This volume is my introduction to Cortázar, part of my 2012 Year of Discovering Latin American and Spanish writers. I have his novels on my horizon, and I'm itching to read them, but I thought starting with a short story volume would be a good introduction. In the past, I have neglected short stories, in part because of an early preference for huge novels that I could escape in for days at a time. There may have been some elements of an introvert's frustration over getting to know a series of characters, only to say goodbye to them after 15 pages or so and to have to ready myself for meeting a whole new set of characters all over again. (Silly, I know - treating a short story collection as a literary cocktail party.)I'm very glad that I've shaken off those earlier views, because I found this collection to be captivating. Cortázar destablizes our understandings of identity in every story. Characters merge into other characters. Boundaries, physical and psychic, dissolve in thin air. When reading the first story, Axolotl, I actually had a physical sense of my perspective shifting at a key point in the story, almost as if I were watching a film and visualizing an extreme change in perspective. Cortázar also is masterful at creating a surreal atmosphere of menace in many of these stories, which is all the more effective because the danger doesn't unfold all at once. It creeps up on the reader. I have read other reviewers who discussed their confusion when reading many of these stories. Cortázar often uses a technique of jumping midway into his narrative and leaving it up to the reader to patiently hang on for the ride until he provides clues to piece together later in the story. If you're willing to play along with Cortázar, there's a game-like quality in many of these stories. For this reason, I recommend not reading it all at once from beginning to end. Some time between stories helps to increase the feeling of tension at Cortázar's approach.This is a volume that begs for re-reading. I plan to revisit it soon.
—Kris
"Blow-up" is a collection of quite bizarre surreal short stories. Most of these tales involve identity in some way - transformation from one identity to another, strange connections between individuals that blur the distinctions between identities, the destruction of identity and self through interactions with others. The stories are often violent, there is death and horror everywhere. Cortazar creates an often nightmarish landscape where things are not as they seem and the otherworldly appears an ordinary part of existence. Stylistically Cortzar explores some very unconventional storytelling. Which often makes these stories a bit confusing. In some instances I had to just continue reading for a number of pages before I could figure out what was going on. Cortzar is also sometimes intentionally vague, and we are never quite sure what exactly has occurred. Nevertheless many of these stories have some really interesting ideas and are worth the struggle.A good read.
—Colin N.
