Julio Cortazar, Blow-Up and Other Stories (1968)

Cortazar wrote six novels total, but none of the others have anywhere near the cachet of Hopscotch. So, I decided to read this collection of short stories, which is his second-most famous book, and that was a hella anglocentric thing I just said, since it doesn't even exist in Spanish: it's a collection of stories taken from a number of previous collections. That's okay, though!

The collection's a little variable, but there's some really great stuff here, for sure. There's some Borges-esque stuff, some magical realism, and some that's just plain unsettling. In a good way. It opens with "Axolotl," which wonderfully opens like this:

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

The story goes where you might thing a story starting like that would go (if you were me, anyway), but it's a lot of fun.

There's "The Night Face Up," the most Borgesian story in my estimation, which is quite disturbing and lingers in the memory. And there's "Continuity of Parks," a two-page story that manages to be just the most perfect little moebius strip you can imagine. It's fantastic. Oh, and I also want to mention "House Taken Over," which is just so inexplicable and creepy you've gotta love it. La.

How about the title story? This collection was actually originally titled The End of the Game and Other Stories, but it was retitled to capitalize on the 1966 Antonioni film (shockingly crass commercialism!). I haven't seen the movie, but it's hard to imagine how that works. This seems an extremely slight narrative to base anything other than a short art film around. I should watch it! But it's actually a very strange story. Because here's the thing: it's quite artfully constructed. It switches between first- and third-person, and it's about an amateur photographer who photographs a Paris scene of a man and a woman, only when he later gets the photograph expanded, he realizes something shocking, and kind of has a break-down. It's really cool about shifting perspectives and whatnot, but here's the thing, I'm going to reveal the denouement, spoilers whatever: what he realizes is that instead of it being a picture of a man trying to pick up a woman, as he had thought, it actually depicts a man who he had thought was just a random background figure picking up the guy. DRAMATIC CHIPMUNK. And...I mean, it's just silly, and it's weird to me that no reviews appear to acknowledge its silliness. "The rest of it would be so simple, the car, some house or another, drinks, stimulating engravings, tardy tears, the awakening in hell." Yes. Cortazar was a canny enough writer that I'm not necessarily going to ascribe this moral horror to him personally, but it's just...what are we supposed to make of it? It could be the narrator struggling with his own sexual identity, I guess, but there's really no hint of that in the story. It's just...I don't know. I am reminded of Marcel's obsession with the idea that Albertine had an endless succession of lesbian lovers. That was silly! And this is silly! Your silly minds! Silly! Silly!

Anyway. There are other stories that don't impress me so much or don't seem to pay off very well. The more realist stories fell a bit flat for me. Still, it's a good collection to read. I'm not objecting. But goodness, what a world we live in!