Cortázar is a writer who refuses to be sullen in literature and sets out to prove that it can be a form of entertainment. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.
Julio Cortazar is an Argentinian novelist and storyteller. He was born on 26 August 1914 in Brussels. He is one of Argentina's greatest writers. He studied in Argentina.
He was imprisoned when he participated in the protest against the Peron administration while he was a university lecturer. He dropped out of university after being imprisoned. He settled in Paris to work as a translator at UNESCO.
He wrote the books that made him famous while in this city. He often included fantastic elements in his stories. He intertwined the real world with extraordinary lives.
Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984) was an Argentine, naturalised French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.
Apart from literature, his areas of interest include mythology, psychology, cinema, and photography.
He translated the works of Edgar Allen Poe into Spanish. He died in Paris in 1984.
In all his works, he combined the search for experimental literature with the realism of everyday life.
What stories did Cortazar write?
Jorge Luis Borges, the famous name of Argentine literature and one of the founding fathers of magical realism, said, “No one can tell the plot of a Cortázar text; Each of his texts consists of certain words brought together in a certain order. "When we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost," he says. While even Borges talks about the impossibility of explaining it, my concern should be understandable, right? But here are all my worries, we are in your presence. I don't know if I can adequately describe a person who dances with words, but I couldn't miss the chance to talk about the "giant" Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, known for his nearly two-meter height.
The author, who is of Argentinian origin and was born in Belgium in 1914, but spent a significant part of his life in France and passed away in this country in 1984, is one of the important names of the Latin American literature explosion in the second half of the 20th century. Cortázar, who has written hundreds of stories, one adapted to the cinema with Michelangelo Antonioni's famous film Blow-Up, is also the author of one of the strangest works of world literature, the anti-novel classic Hopscotch.
There is a lot to be said about Hopscotch, a book that is quite difficult to describe, a strange novel that can be read from beginning to end or, as the author suggests, skipping, described by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes as “Hopscotch is to Spanish prose what Ulysses is to English prose.” But with your permission, I would like to hand the floor over to Llosa again:
“When Hopscotch was first published in 1963, it had a seismic effect on the Spanish-speaking world. As writers and readers, our beliefs and prejudices about the means and purposes of narrative art have been shaken to their core, and the boundaries of the narrative genre have expanded to unthinkable points. Thanks to hopscotch, writing is an extraordinary form of entertainment, it is possible to discover the secrets of the world and language by having a great time, and it is possible to drill by playing games in the mysterious layers of life that are close to rational knowledge and logical mind, in the depths of experience that no one can look out of without taking great risks such as death or madness. we learned. In Hopscotch, reason and irrationality, sleep and wakefulness, objectivity, and subjectivity, story and fantasy lose their defining characteristics, and the boundaries between them disappear.”
There is an extraordinary thing that Cortázar does, especially in his stories: The author first divides the world we are accustomed to into layers, and then attempts to destroy those layers one by one. It takes every layer of our level of consciousness and bends and twists it. After transforming your mind into a tabula rasa, he dives in with his shoes, puts his perfect technique into action, and starts playing with the language. Once you enter the story, you are in another universe: Welcome into the strange mind of Cortázar.
Perhaps should also say that the only bad thing about reading Cortazar is finishing his story or novel. Because the world you return to after the surreal places it takes you may seem very bland and boring. But I can guarantee that the joy of being able to go to a place, which is very rare in the world and where the mind works in a different way, will stay with you for a long time.