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Paul Delvaux, The Nightwatchman II (Le Veilleur II) from the cover. ORIGINAL TITLE: "Le Tour du jour en quatre-vingts mondes"
selected from "La vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos" and
"Ultimo round"
Buy it at amazon.com (In association with Amazon.com) The book is wonderfully illustrated, some of these drawings are Cortázar's "collages" and there must be a pattern in the whole work, somewhere. Along with Rayuela, this is perhaps the book that most closely prefigures the development of the "collage machine" we call the World Wide Web. Sprinkled with images, drawings, paintings, quotations and allusions, this book is a realization of cross-references across media. The author of this book is certainly Narcissus who stands before shimmering, inconstant mirors and talks to himselves. Around the Day in 80 Worlds is the most autobiographical book written by this author, perhaps as a result of the book's grounding in the poet's "real" life, it is the work for which he is most indebted to Borges. The reader must understand that our author has in the past come to a point where, tired of transcribing from one language to another, he begins to transcribe the dancing electrons in his brain onto another secret babbled toungue. |
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair.Pablo Neruda
I don't want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar."