Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) was an Argentine writer and translator whose experimental fiction, especially Hopscotch and “House Taken Over,” reshaped Latin American literature.

Hopscotch: Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel offers alternative reading sequences and follows expatriate intellectuals in Paris and Buenos Aires. Its open structure is Cortázar’s best-known experiment with the reader’s role.
Blow-Up: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, loosely based on Cortázar’s story “Las babas del diablo.” The adaptation turns Cortázar’s uncertainty about images and evidence into cinema.
Brussels: The capital of Belgium, where Cortázar was born in 1914. His family’s wartime stay in Brussels began a childhood spent between countries.
Aurora Bernárdez: An Argentine translator and editor who was Cortázar’s first wife and later literary executor. Bernárdez translated with Cortázar and preserved his papers and literary legacy.
Reader-response criticism: A literary approach that studies how readers participate in producing a text’s meaning. The selectable chapters of Hopscotch make readerly participation part of the novel’s design.
“House Taken Over”: A short story by Cortázar in which an unseen force gradually displaces two siblings from their home. It condenses his uncanny fiction into an ordinary domestic setting.
Las babas del diablo: A Cortázar short story about a photographer whose image seems to disclose a hidden event. It is the source of Antonioni’s Blow-Up and a key example of his perceptual ambiguity.
Buenos Aires: The capital and largest city of Argentina, central to its political and cultural life. Cortázar grew up near Buenos Aires and made the city a setting in works such as Hopscotch.
Carol Dunlop: A Canadian writer and photographer who was Cortázar’s second wife and collaborator. Their shared road journey through France became the book The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.
Nonlinear narrative: A narrative whose events are presented outside chronological order or through multiple sequences. Cortázar uses rearranged chapters to make narrative order an explicit artistic choice.

Linked from 5 pages