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8 jul 2011

Cortázar

As an undergraduate i read all the Cortázar I could. Los premios, a strange novel about a group of people who win, as a prize, a trip on a ship on which strange things happen. All the brilliant short stories, like "Continuidad de los parques" and "La casa tomada." Rayuela, of course. I am not particularly interested now in Cortázar, but he defined a certain moment in my own development as a reader. I don't know if I could ever go back and be a really interested reader, but it strikes me that someone could go back to this body of work and do something interesting with it.

7 comentarios:

  1. Have you seen "Vendredi soir" (2002), by Claire Denis? It's a French take on "Autopista al Sur", about a woman caught in a traffic jam in Paris on, of course, a Friday night, and a stranger she picked up. I highly suggest it. Here is the link to the movie in Amazon:

    http://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-Val%C3%A9rie-Lemercier/dp/B0000C23D1/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1310133954&sr=8-7

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  2. Thanks for these recommendations. I read a book of his stories in translation, and was powerfully impressed by the prose -- but the theme of doubling/mirroring characters was repeated compulsively.

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  3. I'll see the movie. I taught Rayuela recently and it was an interesting experience -- I hadn't read it in a long time. It seemed really, really dated and I came to the conclusion that the fun way to teach it, now, would be as the ONE book read in a term. You'd read it and the intertexts, and get fascinated. I discovered that S. Colas at Michigan had actually taught such a course and had a website for it. I'm not interested in him enough to make him a research subject but I did write a couple of short stories as a result of teaching that class. Cortazar always seems to do that for me and it is always broadening somehow.

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  4. I had the same experience with Rayuela. When I taught it it seemed very dated and the grad students were not enthralled with it or with C's misogyny.

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  5. @Spanishprof, I haven't gotten hold of the movie yet but none of the (few) reviews I've looked at mention Cortazar as a source ... warum nicht, ich frage mir.

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  6. @Z: By her biography, I know that when she began as a filmmaker, she did short films based on Cortazar's short stories. So I don't know if htere is a specific acknowledgement of the story in the movie, but it certainly was an influence.

    Sorry, besides English and Spanish, I only read French and Portuguese. I forgot my German.

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  7. I've seen it now, gorgeous. I had lost track of her, and I didn't know the Cortazar connection.

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