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100th out of 683 books
—
2,746 voters
Blow-Up and Other Stories
A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious,...more
Paperback, 288 pages
Published
February 12th 1985
by Pantheon
(first published 1966)
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Aug 24, 2011
Mariel
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
there she blows!
Recommended to Mariel by:
oriana
The rhymes are busting a move in front of my face. Little misses up in my business as if I were their hostage on the other side of the peephole. Tap, tap, tap make it move. Do I have no legs because I do not dance? If a man's castle were really his own... Am I a fish because I am in a bowl or am I in a bowl because I am a fish? Did I become my mother and say "Because I said so!" or "Read my lips N-O"? (with a soundtrack of the world's tiniest violin) and the kid Thing Two (my twin was Thing One...more
Cortazar's craft as a short story writer is staggering. Even when I wasn't completely engaged by the characters and situations, it was hard not to be blown away by his sinuous, rhythmic way of turning sentences. Like Borges, he operates in a territory where time and memory bleed in and out of each other, where reality flirts with the surreal, the magical and the menacing but is still grounded by the concrete, charmed details of everyday existence. I can't think of many things as utterly mesmeriz...more
oxolotl is my favorite story. i read it when i used to live in front of my fishtank and memorize the patterns they would swim in. this story came out of my fishtank, back in history, onto the written page and into my hands... then it made me surreal insane and sublime... i fell in love with this man for finding and showing me a place i so desperately needed to be.
These stories gave me the deepest, from-childhood reading pleasure of anything I can remember reading in the past year, maybe the past five. Cortazar is master of the phase transition: from innocence to corruption, lover to rapist, human to beast, living to dead, reader to character, from a soul in one body to a soul in another, he takes you across the invisible lines between incompatible states with such terrifying skill that you feel an actual physical reverberation from the journey. And you w...more
This volume is my introduction to Cortázar, part of my 2012 Year of Discovering Latin American and Spanish writers. I have his novels on my horizon, and I'm itching to read them, but I thought starting with a short story volume would be a good introduction.
In the past, I have neglected short stories, in part because of an early preference for huge novels that I could escape in for days at a time. There may have been some elements of an introvert's frustration over getting to know a series of ch...more
In the past, I have neglected short stories, in part because of an early preference for huge novels that I could escape in for days at a time. There may have been some elements of an introvert's frustration over getting to know a series of ch...more
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the story "Axolotl". When I envied those rhythms, their faint movements, those sentences in particular, intimate, slightly illogical, thought-like vectors achieving a rolling quality that is not like a sentence at all. Yes, above all I envied Cortazar's sentences, which are unique in their grammatical messiness, their organic connections, the imperceptible consequences of unfolding. Those days I read "Axolotl" obsessively, drunk on the sound of...more
A while ago Molly was going to lend this book to me. Then she changed her mind and kept it. I had to wait until she left for Spain to read it. I thought this was strange at the time, a bit selfish, out-of-character, but I understand now. Looking at it lying on my bed after I finished it just now, I thought, that's it? Now I just slip it back into the row of other books? Make do with the memory and not the material of it? No. I want it out a little longer. It's like a talisman somehow. I want it...more
Nov 25, 2008
Tia
is currently reading it
after reading Hopscotch...and reading it some more I figured I'd continue hanging out in Julio's alternate universe for awhile...though I understand that in English he is "more intense."
I enjoy it so far though I have to admit I am having trouble connecting with his particular brand of dreamy surrealism. I enjoy that the, for lack of a better word, surrealism is lackadaisical, dreamy and almost lazy, that it haunts the stories rather than animates them, but for some reason I am having trouble making any kind of emotional connection with the characters though I do find their mania, if it may be conceived of as such, intriguing. Just going by the first couple of stories there see...more
Cortazar isn't easy to read but he's worth the effort. In this collection of short stories several stand out in my mind - Axolotl, House Taken Over, Bestiary, Blow-Up, End of the Game and The Pursuer.
I was particularly surprised to find out that Cortazar was very knowledgeable about jazz. The Pursuer is a 65 page short story about a jazz musician named Johnny Carter. It soon becomes apparent that Cortazar is writing about jazz great Charlie Parker. Many of the principle characters are easily ide...more
I was particularly surprised to find out that Cortazar was very knowledgeable about jazz. The Pursuer is a 65 page short story about a jazz musician named Johnny Carter. It soon becomes apparent that Cortazar is writing about jazz great Charlie Parker. Many of the principle characters are easily ide...more
The first story of Cortazar's that I ever read was "La Noche Boca Arriba", roughly translatable as "The Night Turned Upside Down". It creeped me out then, and it still creeps me out. As in many of Cortazar's stories, it revolves around the idea that the protagonist simultaneously inhabits two parallel realities, that beyond the "normal events" being described lies a far more terrible world ready to engulf the protagonist (for instance, the obsidian knife of the Aztec executioner-priest).
Or ther...more
Or ther...more
Recommended to me by a friend for my trip to Argentina and Uruguay. I'm so glad I read this intriguing collection of stories, and I finished it before leaving Argentina. Cortazar has a way of blending beautiful imagery with chilling unease, rather like images from a Guillermo Del Toro film, so that even when I don't understand what is happening in a particular story, I'm still entranced and hanging on every word. My favorite was The Gates of Heaven, in part because I was in Buenos Aires when I r...more
Maybe it isn't fair to review this since I only read the four stories that I have to read for class, but I'll go ahead. I think Cortazar should have written poetry, if he didn't. His language is absolutely arresting and beautiful, and many paragraphs, if lineated, would make great poems, or even prose poems. The problem I have is that the language is almost TOO intoxicating - these stories were frustrating for me because I kept getting lost in the microlevel of the words and thus losing importan...more
"Blow-up" is a collection of quite bizarre surreal short stories. Most of these tales involve identity in some way - transformation from one identity to another, strange connections between individuals that blur the distinctions between identities, the destruction of identity and self through interactions with others. The stories are often violent, there is death and horror everywhere. Cortazar creates an often nightmarish landscape where things are not as they seem and the otherworldly appears...more
Full of lines that were interesting in part because they were confusing, e.g. "Somebody told me that the marquesa had given Lan money too, without Lan knowing where it had come from. Which didn't surprise me at all, because the marquesa was absurdly generous and understood the world, a little like those omelets she makes at her studio when the boys begin to arrive in droves, and which begins to take on the aspect of a kind of permanent omelet that you throw different things into and you go on cu...more
After first reading "Hopscotch," I devoured several of Cortazar's books in college, during a very long, hot, idle summer in Albuquerque. Other favorite experiences that summer included driving "Marlene," the black 1963 Volvo coupe I'd built from the ground-up (9 months), out to the volcano basin on the west side of town, past the Rio Grande, to watch the sun set, listening to things like Miles Davis's "Sketches of Spain" and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Cortazar is a master of altered atmosphere and o...more
Cortazar is a master of altered atmosphere and o...more
It's always good to come across a writer who leads you to a new world and gives you a new way of looking at things. So it is with Cortazar and his stories in this book. I liked most of the stories, where reality is disrupted by something bizarre or mysterious, ending sometimes in horror ('The Night Face Up', 'The Idol of the Cyclades'). I thought reality is also presented as something 'flimsy' that could give way to something else ('Axolotl', 'Secret Weapons', 'Blow-up').
Later stories are more...more
Later stories are more...more
The stories in this marvelous collection are divided into three numbered sections and were drawn from three different anthologies first published in Spanish. The first stories, section one and the beginning of section two, are magnificently surreal—a man watches axolotls (a Mexican salamander) at the aquarium with an intensity that results in the man becoming the axolotl who is watching a man at the zoo; three archaeologists steal an idol from a Greek excavation site and first one, then another...more
While reading this book, I turned into the book, but remained myself looking at the book looking at me. Then I threw up a bunny who, it turns out, is creeping up behind me as I write these wor-
A kind fellow GoodReads member put me on to this author and suggested this book of short stories would be the place to start. All I can say is WOW! Thats not a very appropriate word to use in literary review or criticism but that's my initial reaction. His perspective is unique and unsettling, not for the squeamish and for those who are not willing to go along for the ride, its better to back out before you enter further into his unique and some times unsettling perspective. I started with "Blow...more
Reading Cortázar, it's like having a tiger in the room. A cute tiger, stripes and all. You wouldn't know, though, when it's going to pounce. But you know it's going to make a mean move, snack on you maybe, drink your blood, like a poet drinking metaphors, satiated beyond satiety. Like a reader drinking the prose of Cortázar. They are perfect prose pieces, unexpected like tigers. He is one of those prose stylists whose sentences you read for their music and poetry, without caring for the cohesive...more
I cannot for the life of me get through this.
- Secret Weapons: 'Words are born, his, hers, like little animals looking for one antoher...'
- The Pursuer: First of all, I was wrong - chronophobia was just a small part of it - and, in all honesty, I'd like to take this as a sign that the time has come for me to pick up my next Nabokov (finally!!); Secondly, I found myself looping the Fred Astaire version of "The Way You Look Tonight" the whole time. It's not without reason though. Like it or not, Brian Friel is all over the place now.
- Lette...more
- The Pursuer: First of all, I was wrong - chronophobia was just a small part of it - and, in all honesty, I'd like to take this as a sign that the time has come for me to pick up my next Nabokov (finally!!); Secondly, I found myself looping the Fred Astaire version of "The Way You Look Tonight" the whole time. It's not without reason though. Like it or not, Brian Friel is all over the place now.
- Lette...more
Julio Cortazar best works are his short stories. In the collection, Blow up and other stories, the stories range from a child’s fascination with ajolotes to the conflicted relationship of Pierre and Michele in post-world war 2 France. Mostly considered to be the father or the epicenter of Latin Literally boom, Cortazar’s is one writer that deserves to be on the short list of great Latin American writers.
One particular story, Blow Up, is a metalinguistic narrative tale of a photographer taking a...more
One particular story, Blow Up, is a metalinguistic narrative tale of a photographer taking a...more
"I thought of something odd. I arrived in the terrible city and it was afternoon, a green watery afternoon as afternoons never are if one does not help out by thinking of them." -22
"I remember that I stopped to look at the river which was like spoiled mayonnaise thrashing against the abutments, furiously as possible, noisy and lashing." -24
"But I'm not writing you for that reason, I was sending this letter to you because of the rabbits, its seems only fair to let you know; and because I like to...more
"I remember that I stopped to look at the river which was like spoiled mayonnaise thrashing against the abutments, furiously as possible, noisy and lashing." -24
"But I'm not writing you for that reason, I was sending this letter to you because of the rabbits, its seems only fair to let you know; and because I like to...more
If you came up to me and said you felt like reading some really good short stories, this is the book I would put in your hand. Amazing stuff! My vote for the best set of short stories by one author.
Here's a link to just one of the treats you will find within these pages, a quickie I read yearly because it is so compact, yet so vivid, kind of like a surreal poem:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~aargyros/con...
http://www.continuityofparks.com/by-c...
Here's a link to just one of the treats you will find within these pages, a quickie I read yearly because it is so compact, yet so vivid, kind of like a surreal poem:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~aargyros/con...
http://www.continuityofparks.com/by-c...
It's difficult to give an overall rating to a book of short stories like this. For instance, I had a really difficult time getting through "The Pursuer", but I really enjoyed the following story, "Secret Weapons". The book is divided into three parts by theme, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Part one is made up of stories of metamorphosis, which got tiresome fairly quickly. I likely would've enjoyed each story more if they hadn't grown so predictable in their endings. Of part one, I...more
I grew tired of certain mystical themes (i.e., life repeats itself, and two individuals can be telepathically connected and can trade places). Also, certain stories I'm sure I didn't fully understand (e.g., "At Your Service").
My favorite stories in this collection were "End of the Game" and "Bestiary." I also found the following ones engaging: "House Taken Over," "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris," "The Idol of the Cyclades," "The Night Face Up," and "Axolotl."
My favorite stories in this collection were "End of the Game" and "Bestiary." I also found the following ones engaging: "House Taken Over," "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris," "The Idol of the Cyclades," "The Night Face Up," and "Axolotl."
I am not the axolotl of a one trick Porteñan pony with half a tail in Paris. I am just a burro on a windy, rainy street, but I am not behind the glass or a disconnected mirror. There is a nineteenth century streetlamp next to me and it illuminates gold wisps of dust that disappear down the alleyway, unable to find your lace in its gardens or the childish ingenuity running your circles.
This book was a recommendation from Alex. When I first started reading it, I found his style very gimmicky, and thought his leaving things unsaid was largely unjustified in his stories. But as the book progressed, I both settled into this style and the stories got more meaty, with greater character development. By the end I wouldn't say I loved the book, but I had a greater sympathy for what Cortazar was trying to do. In any case, it made me want to read his novels, and see if his concept and ae...more
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Julio Cortázar, born Julio Florencio Cortázar Descotte, was an Argentine author of novels and short stories. He influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers from Mexico to Argentina, and most of his best-known work was written in France, where he established himself in 1951.
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“Now I am an axolotl.”
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“Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.”
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11 people liked it
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