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Loading... Blow-Up: And Other Stories (original 1967; edition 1985)by Julio Cortazar
Work InformationBlow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar (1967)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I read Hopscotch many years ago and loved it, but for some reason didn’t pick up anymore Cortazar until now. I remember not so much about Hopscotch but this book jogged my memory a bit- my favorite stories in this collection were definitely the more realistic ones (Blow Up, End of the Game, The Pursuer) where Cortazar’s formal experiments can really shine. In the more surreal/ symbolic stories I sometimes lost my foothold, which maybe was the point, but mixing the dream like plot with the shifting narrators and time frames sometimes made it all feel a little muddled. What made the stories I mentioned above so excellent was the way Cortazar zips around his characters like a ghost possessing, showing the other side of the mirror so to speak. I love how you can feel the improvisation in his language, where he lets his mind just spool out on the page - appropriate for a writer that seemed to have a great love for jazz. The best this book has to offer is a master class in what you can do when you are well practiced and the ideas are flowing. Well. 10 years ago I wanted to read a specific story in this collection. I'll hope it was the Axolotl story; I quite liked that and honestly it gave me everything I needed to know about the collection. There are a few others I enjoyed and a couple that I found troubling, though after some thought I think he was addressing views rather than expressing them. Anyway, an excellent writer, but I think a handful of well-chosen stories would have been better than the full anthology I'm reading from. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesContainsHeadache [short story] by Julio Cortázar (indirect) Lontana (in Bestiario) by Julio Cortázar (indirect) Circe (in Bestiario) by Julio Cortázar (indirect) Omnibus (in Bestiario) by Julio Cortázar (indirect) The Gates of Heaven [short story] by Julio Cortázar (indirect) Letter to a Young Lady in Paris [short story] by Julio Cortázar (indirect)
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 intended victim . . . Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here--including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name--shows Julio Cortázar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)863Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The rest are depressing, boring, sickening, or bloody... ( )