Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar
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Julio Florencio Cortázar

Born	August 26, 1914 Brussels, Belgium
Died	February 12, 1984 Paris, France
Pen name	Julio Denis
Occupation	Writer
Genres	fiction, prose, epic, poetry
Literary movement	Latin American Boom
Notable work(s)	Hopscotch

Influences Jules Verne, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Surrealism, Tristan Tzara, Nouveau Roman, José Lezama Lima, Hans-Georg Gadamer

Influenced Thomas Pynchon, Georges Perec, Roberto Bolaño, Giannina Braschi

Julio Cortázar, born Jules glorencio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 – February 12, 1984) was an Argentine author of novels and short stories. He influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers from Mexico to Argentina, but most of his best-known work was written in France, where he established himself in 1951.

1 Early life
2 Education and teaching career
3 Years in France
4 Work and legacy
5 Notable works
6 See also
7 Further reading
8 Notes
9 External links

Early life

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Cortázar was born in Bruxelles-Brussels, Belgium on August 26, 1914 a few days after the invasion of Belgium by Germany at the start of World War I. His father, Julio José Cortázar, was the European commercial representative for the family of his wife, María Herminia Descotte, and the couple had arrived in Belgium in 1913.¹. As Cortázar himself put it, "my birth was a product of tourism and diplomacy"²

Soon after the child's birth the family traveled via Frankfurt to Zürich, where they were reunited with María Herminia's parents: Victoria Gabel, who was a German citizen, and her lover, Descotte, who was a French citizen at a time when Frenchmen were not welcome in Belgium. The family spent two years in Switzerland, spent a short time in Barcelona towards the end of the war, and then returned to Argentina.

By then, however, Julio José Cortázar an María Herminia Descotte had split up.³ Cortázar spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, with his mother and his only sister, who was one year younger. He never saw his father again.^{citation needed} His childhood home, with its backyard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories.^{citation needed}, but in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) he described this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading.^{citation needed} His mother selected what he read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."

Education and teaching career

Although Cortázar never completed his degree in philosophy and languages at the University of Buenos Aires, he taught in several provincial secondary schools. In 1938 he published a volume of sonnets under the pseudonym Julio Denis.^{citation needed} He later repudiated this volume.^{citation needed} In 1944 he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo. In 1949 he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Years in France

In 1951, Cortázar, who was opposed to the government of Juan Domingo Perón⁴, emigrated to France, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. From 1952 onward, he worked for UNESCO as a translator. The projects he worked on included Spanish renderings of Robinson Crusoe, Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Mémoires d'Hadrien, and stories by Edgar Allan Poe. He also came under the influence of the works of Alfred Jarry and the Comte de Lautréamont, and wrote most of his major works in Paris. In later years he became actively engaged in opposing abuses of human rights in Latin America, and was a supporter of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Cortázar was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez, to Ugnė Karvelis, and finally to Carol Dunlop. He died in Paris in 1984 and is interred in the Cimetière de Montparnasse, next to Carol Dunlop.

Cortazar's grave in Montparnasse, Paris

Work and legacy

Cortázar wrote numerous short stories, collected in such volumes as Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959). English translations by Paul Blackburn of stories selected from these volumes were published Blow-Up and Other Stories (1967). The title of this collection refers to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup (1967), which was inspired by Cortázar's story Las Babas del Diablo (literally, "The Droolings of the Devil"). Cortázar's story "La Autopista del Sur" ("The Southern Thruway") influenced another film of the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (1967).^{citation needed} Another notable story, "El Perseguidor" ("The Pursuer"),^{citation needed} was based on the life of the jazz musician Charlie Parker.

Cortázar also published several novels, including Los premios (The Winners, 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar, 1968), and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973). These have been translated into English by Gregory Rabassa. The open-ended structure of Hopscotch, which invites the reader to choose between a linear and a non-linear mode of reading, has been praised by other Latin American writers, including José Lezama Lima, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and inspired the work of a Puerto Rican writer, Giannina Braschi, who also titled a chapter in her novel Yo-Yo Boing! after Cortázar's "Blow-Up". Cortázar's use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness owes much to James Joyce and other modernists, but his main influences were Surrealism, the French Nouveau roman and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz. Cortázar also mentions Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet several times in Hopscotch.⁵. His first wife, Aurora Bernárdez, was translating Durrell into Spanish while Cortázar was writing the novel.

Cortázar also published poetry, drama, and various works of non-fiction. One of his last works was a collaboration with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, which relates, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple's extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner.

In 2007 Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor of Paris, formally named a small square on the Île Saint-Louis in honor of Julio Cortázar.^{citation needed}

Notable works

Presencia (1938)
Los reyes (1949)
El examen (1950, first published in 1985)
Bestiario (1951)
Final del juego (1956)
Las armas secretas (1959)
Los premios (The Winners) (1960)
Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962)
Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966)
Blow-up and Other Stories (1968)

Originally published as End of the Game and Other Stories in 1967

A compilation of stories translated into English from the books Final del juego and Las armas secretas

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos) (1967)
62: A Model Kit (62, modelo para armar) (1968)
Last Round (Último Round) (1969)
Prosa del Observatorio (1972)
Libro de Manuel (1973)
Octaedro (1974)
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975)
Alguien anda por ahí (1977)
Territorios (1978)
Un tal Lucas (1979)
Queremos tanto a Glenda (1980)
Deshoras (1982)
Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983)
Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (1983)
Divertimento (1986)
Diario de Andrés Fava (1995)
Adiós Robinson (1995)
Save Twilight (1997)
Cartas (three volumes) (2000)
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (2008)

Notes

^ Cortázar sin barba, by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Random House Mondadori, Editorial Debate, Madrid, 2004
^ Televisión Española, Serie A Fondo. Interview by: Joaquin Soler Serrano.
^ Cortázar sin barba, by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Random House Mondadori, Editorial Debate, Madrid, 2004
^ Cortázar sin barba, by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Random House Mondadori, Editorial Debate, Madrid, 2004
^ Sligh, Charles. "Reading the Divergent Weave A Note and Some Speculations on Durrell and Cortázar." [Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal] NS 6 (1998): 118-132.

External links

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