Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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"
TRANSLATED BY: Thomas Christensen, © 1986
PUBLISHED: San Francisco, North Point Press
ISBN: 0865472033
LCCN: 85060863

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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.

Contents

• I
  • This Is the Way It Begins
  • Summer in the Hills
  • More on Cats and Philosophers
  • Julios in Action
  • On Feeling Not All There: Quotable rambling on his own writing.
  • Returning to Eugénie Grandet
  • Theme for Saint George: A note on Lopez's personal monster and the vanishing tricks of his wallet.
  • On the Sense of the Fantastic
  • This World That Is Ours
  • I Could Dance This Chair, Said Isadore: Adolfe Wolfe, professional madman, amateur painter.
  • One Julio Speaks of Another: A dream of angled mirrors watching me.
  • About Going from Athens to Cape Sounion
  • Clifford
  • Nights in Euorpe's Ministries: Doors left open for translators on moony evenings.
  • Of Another Bachelor Machine: The beginnings of hypertext, or hopscotch-o-matic.
  • Cronopios, Red Wine, and Little Drawers
  • Only a Real Idiot: The aesthete must marvel at the banal.
  • Louis, Super-Cronopio: An Armstrong concert peopled by Cortázar's castes.
  • Around the Piano with Thelonious Monk
  • With Justifiable Pride: The circle of leaves, expeditions, life and death in a society that has codified its customs beyond comprehension.
  • To Reach Lezama Lima
  • The Fire Where Burns a
  • Suspect Relations
  • Encounter with Evil
  • Jack the Ripper Blues
  • To Put an End to Suspect Relations
  • Seasons of the Hand
  • The Most Profound Caress
  • Melancholy of Luggage
  • Take It or Leave It
  • Journey to a Land of Cronopios
  • The Embassy of Cronopios
  • The Airplane of the Cronopios
  • Morelliana Forever
  • The Chameleon's Station
  • Regarding the Synchronocity, Urchronocityor Anachronicity of the Eighty Worlds
  • Enter a Chameleon
  • Personal Coda
• II
  • The Witnesses
  • On the Short Story and Its Environs
  • News about Funes
  • Advice for Tourists
  • A Country Called Alechinsky
  • Toward a Speleology of the Domicile
  • Silvia
  • Your Most Profound Skin
  • Good Investments
  • The Broken Doll
  • The Entrance into Religion of Theodor W. Adorno
  • Makes a Little Star
  • No, No and No
  • Futile Protection
  • Cycling in Grignan
  • The Journey
  • Lunch
  • Short Feature
  • The Lip-Biter's Discourse
  • Glass with Rose
  • Ecumenics Sine Die
  • It is Regrettable That
  • Marcel Duchamp; Or, Further Encounters
  • Outside of Time
  • Don't Let Them
  • To Dress a Shadow
  • Saint-Tropez Night
  • Regarding the Eradication of Crocodiles from Auvergne
  • All Spheres are Cubes
  • Strange Choices
  • Salvador Dalí: Sin Valor Adalid
  • Intolerance
  • Stairs Again
  • How the Jaguars Sap Our Strength
  • The Canary Murder Case II
  • On Graphology as an Applied Science
  • Some Facts for Understanding the Perkians
  • Siestas

"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.
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."