- Argentina - Portal público de noticias de la República Argentina.
Julio Cortázar died 25 years ago on February 12 in the city of Paris. He captivated the world by introducing an element of fantasy in daily reality, and when writing his book entitled "Hopscotch" he brought about a big change in Latinamerican literature.
When writing his book entitled “Hopscotch” he brought about a big change in Latinamerican literature.
He was born in the Argentine Embassy in Belgium on August 26, 1914 and spent his childhood both in Switzerland and Spain. After the First World War he settled with his family in the Buenos Aires district of Banfield.
Since his early childhood he felt attracted to arts and when he was 9 years old he used to read and write compulsively. “They had to pull me by my neck and take me out into the sunshine, because I would read and write on and on”, he himself explained.
Shortly after becoming a teenager he found out that his idea of fantasy differed from that of the others. “I spent my childhood surrounded by dwarves and elves, while holding on to a time and space notion that was different from the one the other people around me had. My reality is that in which fantasy and reality interlink on a daily basis", he pointed out, and such a belief would certainly shape his style.
Back in 1949, he got to publish the following pieces of work namely "The Kings", a mythological drama, and “Bestiario”, which was published in 1951.This last book is a tale book in which his peculiar writing style started to develop as well as the key features characterizing his work: fantasy, ridiculousness and sense of humor. Some time later, he would write "The End of the Game and other stories", "The Secret weapons","Los premios", "Cronopios and Famas".
It was with the tale "The Pursuer" (written in homage to the jazz saxophone player Charlie Parker), which was part of “The End of the Game and other stories", that he anticipated the writing of his masterpiece novel "Hopscotch". It was published back in 1963, and he would be praised by reviewers worldwide as such work would be regarded as part of the Latinamerican boom.
That search for the meaning of life within the children´s game metaphor soon became a classic among contemporary novels, not as an occasional best-seller but as a result of its unprecedented nature posing a challenge to the conventional reader.
Cortázar himself agreed to such novel being labeled as an “antinovel” and he put it this way: "Hopscotch intends to be an attempt to visualize the relationship existing between a novel and its reader differently. It aims at causing the attitude of someone reading novels to change. It occurred to me to begin to write a book in which the reader would have different options to choose from, thus being on an equal footing with the author. The idea he pursued was that the reader could make choices, for example setting aside one part, or reading it while following a different order, and inventing himself a world where he could play an active rather than a passive role".
Since Cortázar wrote his first collection of short stories known as “Bestiario”, his peculiar writing style characterized by the harmony existing in the linking of words could be vividly appreciated. It echoed a rhythm, a musical cadence that sounded in his phrases, which Cortázar himself compared to the jazz “swing”.
With his worldwide success there came along the books "All fires, the fire and other stories","Around the day in eighty worlds", "62/a model kit", "A manual for Manuel " and "Octaedro", among others.
Cortázar died of leukemia on February 12, 1984 in Paris, just over a year after his second wife Carol Dunlop had died. He was buried next to her at the Montparnasse cemetery.
