Papeles inesperados — Julio Cortázar
Published twenty-five years after Julio Cortázar’s death, Papeles inesperados (Unexpected Writings) brings together a vast range of little-known texts by the Argentine author. Though not all technically “unpublished” works, many previously having appeared in newspapers or magazines, this trove varying in style and genre offers Cortázar fans and scholars a fresh look at his work. Co-edited by Carles Álvarez Garriga and Cortázar’s literary executor and former wife, Aurora Bernárdez, Papeles inesperados is among the most important books published in Spanish in 2009.
Jorge Luis Borges said that while Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, and Peruvians from the Incas, the Argentines descended from boats. That connection, closer to the old world than the new, has often set Argentines apart culturally from other Latin Americans. Even to call Cortázar an Argentine is incomplete. Born in Brussels in 1914, he grew up in Argentina but moved to Paris in 1951, where he wrote most of his notable work and where he died. While writers like Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez were forging a style that would become known as magical realism—based upon the very history of the Americas, where one need not look beyond the reality of this world to find the magical, the astonishing, the marvelous—Cortázar would be influenced by surrealism and the novelists of the nouvel roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers, where punctuation and syntax were as important as words in conveying character and setting. (Read More)
June 8th, 2010 at 10:43 am
[...] Flatmancrooked » Blog Archive » Papeles inesperados — Julio Cortázar [...]