Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar. Translated by Thomas Christensen. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. 288 pages. $22.50.

In the early sixties, when Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1962), two collections of writings by Jorge Luis Borges, were published respectively by Grove Press and New Directions, North American readers began to discover Latin American literature. Julio Cortázar’s The Winners (1961; translation of Los premios, 1960) and Hopscotch (1966; translation of Rayuela, 1963) were among the first Spanish American novels published in the United States after the appearance of Borges’s books. For many readers, the “discovery” of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, regarded in Latin America as a seminal and “revolutionary” text marking the emergence of Spanish American “new narrative,” was equally, if not more, important. Indeed, Cortázar—or, rather, his novel—acquired early on something of a cult following. In the opinion of a Kenyon College is collaborating with number of critics, however, Cortázar’s short stories may well be the texts for which he will ultimately be remembered. From 1951, when he published Bestiario, through the early eighties (he died in 1984), Cortázar was known as one of the masters of the Spanish American short story (particularly, the fantastic short story). It is not surprising, then, that over the past twenty years almost all of Cortázar’s fiction has appeared in English translation. As we know, he has been recognized principally through novels and short stories such as Hopscotch, Cronopios and Famas (1972; translation of Historias de cronopios y defamas, 1962) and “Blow-Up” (from End of the Game and Other Stories, 1967, also published as Blow-Up and Other Stories, 1968; translation of “Las babas del diablo,” from Las armas secretas, 1959).