Also, basically, a re-edition of a previous version by Harvill Press (from the late 90s, out of print) plus a new introduction by Irish short-story writer Kevin Barry. For what we have here is not Bestiario but a collection of thirty five of Cortázar’s stories, written and published from the 1950s to the early 1980s, and stretching over three hundred sixty eight pages. Excited with the first part of the title the second one confused me a bit at first, to then shoot my excitement down, because clearly this is a different book to the one I thought it was. Yes, he could have killed more of his darlings, but his darlings are great darlings overall - anyone pushing Cortázar off a window would be a very unwise person.įor these reasons I was very excited to learn of Vintage’s release of Bestiary: The Selected Stories of Julio Cortázar. And because prolificness is unavoidably a hit and miss affair, I have no qualms in declaring him one of the best short story writers of the 20th Century, even considering his duds. That said, I have never defenestrated Cortázar, as it is customary among my Argentine literary peers. Many of the above are fair accusations, which ones are a matter of debate. And this process is even more pronounced when you dedicate to writing more or less seriously: you have to defenestrate Cortázar and get on with your life and your more serious reading. You get into Julio in adolescence, generally through a boyfriend or girlfriend, read part of his vast oeuvre all the way into the late thirties, and when life starts to give you lemons you drop him, protesting his cheesiness, his propensity for corny language experiments, denouncing his oversize and whimsical novel 62: Modelo para armar, and to a lesser extent Rayuela, both books that suffer from the cliché of bohemian Paris, and more precisely the cliché of the Argentine self-exile bohemian in Paris.
If any public display of the first person is an unforgivable sin when writing about someone else’s book, may I be exonerated by declaring that this phenomenon - getting into Cortázar’s in one’s teens, through Bestiario - is a very common occurrence among Argentine readers. I got into Julio Cortázar, in my late teens, through his 1951 book of short stories, Bestiario. When is a book a book of short stories and when is it a collection? The difference might seem niggling but with the help of Julio Cortázar’s Bestiary: Selected Short Stories (Vintage Classics, 2020) it might be possible to see why the distinction matters.īut first a detour via the wavy roads of solipsism.
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