Word: cortã
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...Cort??zar’s demands on the reader’s engagement are perhaps most obvious, however, in the novel’s structure. “Hopscotch” can be read either linearly, from Chapter 1 through Chapter 155, or it can be tackled in the order suggested by the fanciful “Table of Instructions” provided at the beginning of the book, which sends the reader “hopscotching” from one chapter to another based on the loosest of associations. Such “make your own adventure?...
...spoke to it for a while, moved it along the palm of her hand, put it rightside up and upside down, stroked it, and finally she took off the leafy part and left the veins exposed, a delicate green ghost was reflected against her skin,” writes Cort??zar. When La Maga disappears, a despairing Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires to track her down...
...Though Cort??zar’s story “The Devil’s Drool” famously inspired Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 “Blowup,” it’s another Antonioni film—“L’avventura”—that best mirrors the enigmatic circles in which Oliveira moves. In that movie, the presumable storyline of a woman going missing seems to be forgotten by everyone in the scenes that follow; similarly, La Maga’s absence doesn?...
...Indeed, in Cort??zar’s hands, all the possible consolations to which his characters turn—“vodka and Kantian categories,” love or political action—inevitably become only “tranquilizers against any too sharp coagulation of reality.” All individual choices are colored with the pigments of despair; all action comes to seem only a futile bulwark against ultimate insanity, or suicide, or conformity. Reading the book Cort??zar’s way traps one in a final loop between two random chapters...
...there’s a reason why even the gentleman-poet Pablo Neruda was moved to remark, quite seriously, that “anyone who doesn’t read Cort??zar is doomed.” Cort??zar’s hope, given us via Morelli, was to “attempt a work which may seem alien or antagonistic to the time and history surrounding it, and which nonetheless includes it, explains it, and in the last analysis orients it towards a transcendence within whose limits man is waiting.” No light task...