Julio Cortázar

by Ilan Stavans

A story, Julio Cortazar claimed, is born in a sparkle, a thunderous strike of inspiration, and requires very little by way of processing. He considered literature the product of a spirit dictating its craft to numerous scribes everywhere on the globe; his unusual methods of writing short stories was not unlike those developed by the French surrealist Andre Breton and the American Beat writer Jack Kerouac. Author of the internationally acclaimed novel Hopscotch (1963), Cortazar was born in Brussels, raised in Buenos Aires, and self-exiled to Europe in 1951. Although very much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Cortazar has mysteriously fallen out of public favor since his death in 1984. . In this volume Ilan Stavans seeks to redress this neglect, using Cortazar's art to enlighten his life and vice versa. He focuses his analysis on the ways in which, by choosing to rebuff, imitate, or pay homage to Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe, and othe