In part, this is due to my own blindspot when it comes to poetry and poetic writing in part, this is due to the elusive mingling of images and ideas present in this short, dense text.

62: A Model Kit, which applied the theory explicated in chapter 62 of Hopscotch, opens with a preface warning that “not a few readers will notice various transgressions of literary convention here.” Some of the ideas in his short stories are mind-blowing in a consciousness-raising, you-must-be-high sort of way.īut in my opinion, From the Observatory is the most challenging of all his books that I’ve read. Hopscotch is a tricky book, even putting aside the jarring juxtapositions that arise from the strange way of reading it (if you follow the prescribed path, you read a bunch of chapters out of order). It’s not like any of Cortazar’s books are easy. It also happens to be this week’s Read This Next title. This is a meticulously crafted book by a master at the very top of his game, and I highly recommend it.The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote about Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and forthcoming from Archipelago Books. Dark secrets float along the swiftly moving surface of their actions, however, while in the hidden depths beneath the tumultuous waters of the narrative lurk sex, death, betrayal, and finally, murder. Thus their days are spent in either attempting to disturb the placid energies of the normally disposed people around them, or trying to back get into their bizarrely proportioned, enigmatically populated City, where perhaps final solutions to their spiritual angst wait to be discovered behind certain locked and sinister doors. This city is a kind of mental metropolis the friends have constructed as a counter to the real world. The story itself is about a group of friends whose social and intellectual antipathies have led them to contrive certain private games (often dialectical in nature), of which 'The City' is the most complex.

Less ambitious than Hopscotch, perhaps, but more experimental in tone and style, 62: A Model Kit, is a brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed book remarkable not only for the insight into the painful inner meanderings of the human heart and mind it contains, but also for the unique mixture of humorous, frightening, and romantic backdrops against which the action takes place.

62 by Julio Cortázar