The deadpan tone never varies as the story gradually and delightfully runs off its rails.Įach of us has a specific task to be done in this campaign…. “With Justifiable Pride” describes the local custom of visiting the cemeteries on November 2 each year and sweeping away the dead leaves that obscure the graves. “How the Jaguars Sap Our Strength” is about the debilitating effects of finding jaguars in the butter, the lampstand, and the vacuum cleaner. “Regarding the Eradication of Crocodiles from Auvergne” concerns the difficulty faced by the authorities in coping with dangerous creatures when the local people refuse to admit they exist. In “The Witnesses,” a man becomes obsessed with a fly in his room that flies upside down.
Many of them, for some reason, concern animals. The short stories in Around the Day are among my favorites. But just when you have concluded that these are 62 exercises in intellectual gamesmanship, you run up against a piece like “Advice for Tourists,” a direct and devastating picture of the misery of those who live in and around Howrah Station in Calcutta.
The pieces combine Latin American playfulness with French abstract speculation, so that the ostensible subject of a piece often turns out to be a platform for ideas about creativity, mortality, or language. There is also quite a lot about Cortázar’s cat, whose name was Theodor W. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds includes book reviews, travel pieces, short stories, poetry, and appreciations of jazz artists like Clifford Brown, Thelonious Monk, and Louis Armstrong. To call this a collage book doesn’t get us very far. Translated from the original Spanish texts by Thomas Christensen, it was published by North Point Press in 1986. The English-language version did not appear until two years after the author’s death. (Sixty-two was a significant number for the author of 62: A Model Kit.) This “collage book” was followed two years later by another, entitled Last Round.Įleven years later, in 1980, the author chose 62 selections from the two volumes for a new edition of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, to be published in French. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, appeared in its first version in Spanish in 1967.
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