Word: cortazar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BANNED by the Argentine government in 1973. But it's hard to see why. For a novel about a group of expatriot Latin Americans in Paris ("The Screwery") who do little but eat, discuss metaphysics and screw, Julio Cortazar's A Manual for Manuel is far from politically threatening. Self-indulgent maybe, but not subversive...
...Some say Cortazar is moving into a more socially conscious phase--in A Manual he makes a political statement in his preface and includes revolutionary characters--but his main emphasis is still on esthetics. Unlike other South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Migel Angel Asturias, Cortazar does not concern himself with the social and political ills of his country...
...Manual is an anti-novel without a definable plot. Interspersed between chapters without numbers and of varying lengths, are news-clippings about the torture of Latin American revolutionaries and their terrorist endeavors. Cortazar builds the entire book around these visually super-imposed articles, which are being compiled for a scrapbook for Manuel, the child of a Screwery member. The collection serves as a guide to the beliefs of Manuel's parents...
...structure is gimmicky, but the contrivance works. The book ensnares the reader with its disjointed collage of witty literary references and snatches of absurd conversation. The characters may be political neophytes, but they are intelligent and believable--a far cry from Cortazar's previous two-dimensional protagonists...
...employer. The fraud continues for a year or so, until the mother dies. Three or four days later the last of the forged letters from "Alejandro" arrives for his mother. One of Alejandro's sisters opens it, and finds herself in tears. "She had been thinking," Cortazar writes bemusedly, "about how she was going to break the news to Alejandro that Mama was dead...