Hello, my friends. Welcome to my corner. Today is a very special day for me. Yesterday we celebrated two years of Jorge's Corner, this is video number 100, and most importantly, today this great novel that I have right here, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, turns 60, because it was exactly 60 years ago that this novel was published for the first time. I first read Rayuela when I was 20 years old, and it was very difficult to me to actually make the decision to read this book, even though I had fallen in love with his short stories briefly before that. So, I was intimidated by this novel, I'll be honest with you, and I was just waiting for the right time to read it. You know that experience? When you're waiting for the right time for a book? I don't know. Is there a right time for a book or a wrong time for it? I've had experiences where, you know, I had a great book that I wanted to read, and for some reason at that point I was not ready, and maybe that's what I was thinking, you know: I was kind of scared that that would be the case with Rayuela for me. But then one spring break I was like, you know, I just grabbed my copy of it, I started reading it, and I just continued. I think I just jumped into the pool. It was a leap of faith, and I'm really, really happy that I took that leap of faith, because that's how I had that first experience of this novel. I was basically amazed, I was infuriated, I was confused, and I was somehow enlightened too, and that was the important part of the experience for me. So, I read it again at the beginning of this year as I was dealing with surgery, okay? I had to go through surgery, and this was my companion… different copy, but same book… this was my companion during those difficult times. Nothing major, nothing extremely difficult, fortunately, but you know, enough to make me have a kind of an existential crisis, and I'm glad that Rayuela was my companion during those difficult days. And by the way, I know that this is called Hopscotch in English, and I can pronounce that word pretty well, I think, but for some reason I cannot call it Hopscotch, okay? This is one of those books that I think you should call by their real name, or their original name, and you have to say it with an Argentine accent. So, you can practice with me: Rayuela. Rayuela. That's how you want it to sound. And it's… it's kind of easy, okay? It's… it's all right, you know, it's… it's not like Tres tristes tigres, which is a, you know, it's a tongue-twister in itself, so that that's a different one, but in this one, I'm going to call it Rayuela throughout this video. Rayuela is Cortázar's second novel, can you believe that? His first one is Los premios, or The Winners, as it is known in English, and in that novel he included a note to the effect… and I am paraphrasing here… that readers should not expect the same kind of thing from him in the future, not a novel like Los premios, or The Winners. And I think Rayuela just proved the point, right? There… it's like, “You need proof for that? Here it is, you know, I have this… this brick right here for you, so that you can enjoy it and realize how different it is.” Los premios is kind of allegorical, it's kind of symbolic, right? And Rayuela is something completely different, or maybe you could say that Rayuela is also allegorical, it's also symbolic, but it is also much more than that, and that is the difference right there. William Carlos Williams. Have you read that great poet? When The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot came out, he compared it to an atom bomb, the effect of this poem on the literary scene. I think the same thing could be said about Rayuela, okay? And it's a novel that many people love, it's a novel that many people hate. What can be said about it that has not been said already? I really don't know. These are just some impressions, some ideas that I have on Rayuela. That's what I want to share with you. Rayuela begins with fire and invention, if you take chapter 73 to be the first chapter. Or, if you take chapter number one to be the first chapter, which is also a possibility, it begins with an absence. So we have a void right there, a person who is feeling this empty space, and that's how the novel begins. This chapter is a wonderful introduction to Cortázar in itself. So, if you have not read Cortázar at all, read this first chapter and you're going to realize a lot of the way that he tells stories and the way that he builds worlds, because that is basically what Cortázar does. The characters are not described, and yet by the time that you finish reading the chapter you feel that you know them, especially La Maga, who is not described. We don't know if she is blonde, if she is dark-haired, but by the end of the chapter we know most of the things that we want to know about her personality. And La Maga is, in this first chapter, addressed directly, so we have that very effective of use of the second person that has to do also with the way that Cortázar establishes a relationship with his reader, which is something that we're going to explore briefly in a few minutes too. The rejection of serendipity, I would say, is one of the elements that you find in this chapter, okay? Things are basically bound by invisible ties, according to Cortázar. There are ties between things that we are not aware of and that for the most part we are not even interested in finding out, and that, to Cortázar, is a problem. The fact that there are so many connections between things that we do not know about and we seem to be just, you know, unable to care about those things or maybe too occupied with other more important things, which he would have disdained, of course. Horacio and La Maga, what they're trying to do is they're trying to look at life in a different way and to live life a different way. It's a novel about praxis, if you want to call it that, because this is about how to live your life differently. She is presented as impulsive, on the one hand, and he's basically pedantic, and he's also obsessive in his behavior, and in this first chapter you get a very good example of that with the episode of the sugar lump that flies under the table, so that already tells you a lot, through that episode where you learn a lot about Horacio Oliveira. In this first chapter we are also introduced to the Serpent Club, which is a very important component of the novel, and there are also avatars of this Serpent Club in Cortázar's other novels. So, if you read the other novels you're going to find a lot of recurring elements. Another thing I like about chapter one, something that is present throughout the novel but you specifically see it from the start and this chapter, are the allusions, and there's that wonderful feeling when you read Rayuela and you get the references, you know what I'm saying? So, that's a way that Cortázar has of making you connect with the character, though in many ways this is a character that you do not really want to sympathize with or you do not really want to connect with, because it's a very problematic character, and we're going to talk about that too. There is no exposition in Rayuela, or maybe something else that we could say is that there's an organic type of exposition. Cortázar just plunges you in medias res into the text, and he talks about people, about places, about situations, as if you knew what he's talking about. In that sense, I would say he is the least condescending of authors, because he assumes that you know things that there's absolutely no way for you to know. And how do you find out more about these people, for example, these characters that he mentions? Morelli, Ronald, Étienne, Gregorovius, all of these people. How do you do that? You just have to keep reading. That is Cortázar's strategy when it comes to involving you with the text and with the story. He mentions these things and you're like, “What is he talking about? I need to keep reading in order to find out.” Cortázar feeds you the details little by little. We find out that La Maga has a son. We find out that Horacio has a brother who's also lawyer. So, the moral of the story here, I think, is that exposition is not only artificial; as far as Cortázar is concerned, it is also unnecessary. In Rayuela, as in most of Cortázar's novels, the group of friends replaces the family. That's what we have here with the Club de la Serpiente, or the Serpent Club. And this Serpent Club is an association of expats from all around the world: from France, from the U.S., from England, from Argentina, from Uruguay. They are intellectuals, okay? They are pedantic people, sometimes. They are artists, they are poets, and they exist at the margin of society. Now, this arrangement is very convenient for Cortázar, because it really allows him to present us with a microcosm of the global city, which in this case would be, of course, Paris. It really foreshadows our global world, but in those days you… it would have to happen in a place like Paris. You could not have set a novel or the action of a novel in Buenos Aires with all of those characters from so many different places. Now, these days this could happen also in the U.S. It could happen in England. It could happen in Spain. Because we are really living in a global world. Now, something very interesting that I was thinking about is how the U.S. is really a global nation, and yet you do not find something like this in a U.S. novel, this scope of representation. So, I think that speaks in favor of Cortázar, and it also speaks volumes about our society here in the U.S., but maybe that's a topic for a future video, or to explore in the context of a different text. Horacio is an intellectual. He is pedantic. He overthinks things. La Maga, on the other hand, is presented as instinct, impulse, things have to be explained to her because she never gets the references. I want to read you a little passage from the novel that explains how Horacio feels about La Maga and also tells you a lot about how he perceives himself and how he perceives their relationship. So, this is on page 96 of the English translation, in chapter 21. “It's not necessary to know things as I do, one can live in disorder without being held back by any sense of order. That disorder is her mysterious order, that bohemia of body and soul which opens its true doors wide for her. Her life is not disorder except for me, buried among the prejudices I despise and respect at the same time. Me, inexorably condemned to be pardoned by La Maga who judges me without knowing it. Oh, let me come in, let me see someday the way your eyes see.” And I was wondering when I read this, I thought, “Isn't that maybe what love is?” Being able to see things, at least momentarily, from the perspective of another person. Being able to look through their eyes in that way. Is Rayuela a love story? It really begs the question. I would say that yes, yes it is, it is a love story, and maybe the way that we feel about Horacio, maybe the things that he says sometimes may cause us to doubt that. We may think, “No, this is not a love story. Look at how this guy is expressing himself and what he feels towards her.” But don't forget that he's confused, and that he's a jerk, also. And I think Cortázar almost said as much in a letter to a friend of his, when he called Horacio a “pobre desgraciado.” That's how he described him. How would I translate “pobre desgraciado”? I think you would have to say something like he's “a poor bastard,” or something like that, but also look at the word “desgraciado,” which in English the closest thing would be “disgraced,” right? So, somebody who is “desgraciado” is somebody who does not have “gracia,” a disgraced person, literally speaking, a person without grace. So that's another way of looking at the character, and I think in that sense we do have to remember that Horacio is not necessarily the kind of character that we want to applaud or that we want to identify with. There's another little quote here that I marked, and this one is on chapter… let's see… it's in… it's on page 180, chapter 31, and this is something that Gregorovius says, and I feel that he nails the character of Horacio. Nails, by the way, are very important in the second part of the of the novel. This is what Gregorovius says: “I don't know, I'm just guessing. All the time I've known you, all you've done is search, but one gets the feeling that what you're looking for is right in your pocket.” In chapter 97, Morelli says that the only protagonist that he is interested in is the reader. Cortázar is one of those authors who really involve you in the process of creation. He wants you to be a cómplice, he wants you to be a camarada de camino. These are words that he uses. He wants you to be a co-participant and a co-padeciente, somebody who suffers along with the writer as the work of art, as the novel, is produced. So, like Ulysses, and like any work of art that is worthy of the name, if you ask me, Rayuela is not so much an organization but an organism. It is something that develops and that takes shape as we have it in our hands. It develops right before our eyes into the wonderful and the monstrous thing that it is, and we are invited directly by Cortázar to be a part of that process, to be an integral part of it, not, you know, somebody who's outside the work of art but somebody who co-participates in it. Remember the story “Continuity of Parks,” in which you have this bleeding of fiction into reality, basically, and vice versa, and you have this character who is the reader and vice versa, and the reader… spoiler alert… dies at the end. So “Continuity of Parks” already gives you much of the poetics of Rayuela, and I think that this is a novel that you cannot read passively, and Cortázar within the novel says as much. He condemns what he called the “lector hembra,” and of course he regretted using that term, for obvious reasons. I think you would have to say “lector pasivo,” or a passive reader, but that's another story. But you know what he's saying. He's saying you cannot just be aloof as you read this novel, you have to become part of it in order to be a part of this reading experience and in order for the reading experience to actually take place in its full capacity. So that is Cortázar's modus operandi, I would say. He really wants you to be a part of his creation, and that's something that very few authors do. So I think it's a good invitation that we should all accept. Rayuela is a novel and/or an anti-novel, and also a theory of the novel. Every work of art, in a sense, implies a theory of art, every novel implies a theory of the novel, and some novels choose to make that explicit, and that's when we speak of metafiction, which in this case we have through the character of Morelli. So, we hear about him from the very beginning particularly in the expendable chapters, so many people say that those extra chapters that we have in Rayuela are dedicated primarily to the character of Morelli, but we also learn a lot of details about him when he has that accident. That's how we get into his house, in a way. We find out that he's a writer, that he lives by himself, that he has a cat, that he is surrounded by books. In other words, we can tell that he is Cortázar's alter ego, but then so is Horacio, right? And so are many of the other characters that we find in Rayuela. So, that little saying about “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” that Flaubert shared with as many years ago, it also goes for Rayuela, and that shows you how complex this novel is. I love chapter 62 because it contains the poetics of another novel, which is, of course, 62: A Model Kit. In this novel, what Cortázar tried to do was to show characters as puppets of outside forces that they do not understand. This is not the equivalent of determinism. All that he is saying is that the characters retain their autonomy but there's something else going on, something that they do not understand and that they do not have access to. He says, “El hombre no es sino que busca ser, proyecta ser.” So, “Human beings are not, but they are trying to be, they seek to be, they project to be.” “Project” is really not a good translation there, but “they intend to be,” maybe is a way to translate it that sounds a little bit better. There's a short story by Cortázar that not many people talk about, and it's titled “Clone,” or “Clone,” I guess you would say in English. And it's not one of his best short stories in terms of the story itself, but it is really a very good experiment, because in this story each one of the characters represents a musical instrument, okay? And actually, if you look at the structure of the story, it follows the structure of Bach's Musical Offering, so what you have here is basically a piece of music translated into storytelling language, with the characters being represented by instruments and vice versa. That is, I think, a way also of comparing, you know, Cortázar's one short story “Clone” with 62: A Model Kit, because the mechanics here is basically the same: we have characters who are manipulated, if you will, by outside forces. 62: A Model Kit is, in my humble opinion, Cortázar's masterpiece in terms of the structure and in terms of the mechanics, so I would say it is his technical masterpiece, but at the same time I realize that maybe Rayuela is a more important novel. I do get the feeling, however, that many people who do not enjoy 62… part of the problem, at least, is that maybe they do not grasp very well what Cortázar was trying to do. And I had a very difficult time with this also. When I read chapter 62, I was like, “Okay, so this is going to explain 62: A Model Kit for me?” It took a little bit more than that. I had to read a little bit more, read some criticism and stuff like that, because I did not exactly get it the first time, but once I understood what he was trying to do I felt like, “Oh my gosh, I need to go back and reread this novel with this philosophy in mind.” And that's how I had a much better experience of this other novel that I now consider to be his masterpiece. There are two long chapters in the first part of Rayuela. The first one is chapter 23, and this is the famous Berthe Trépat episode, with this piano player. It is such a pathetic episode. Every time I read it I get this sense of pathos right here, because it reveals so much of who Horacio is, and maybe it reveals a lot of what he doesn't want to reveal. So, this is one chapter in which Horacio is basically opened up for us. There is plenty of intellectualism, there is plenty of sarcasm at work here, there's irony, there is bluntness, there's pedantry, and I feel that all of these are basically masks that Horacio uses in order to hide his vulnerability. So, that's just my thought on chapter 23. The other long chapter is chapter 28, which is the Rocamadour episode, and it is also a very sad episode. This is the longest chapter in the novel, in the entire novel, okay? And it is a big turning point too for the characters. Horacio is really shown in this chapter as a total jerk, so if Cortázar recognized that this guy was a jerk, this is… and if you had any doubts by chapter 28… this is where you actually find out, and where you go, “Yes, I can totally see that.” So, it's another pathetic, another incredibly sad moment in the novel, and as you may remember, Gabriel García Márquez actually spoiled this chapter in Cien años de soledad. So, having spent some time in the wonderful city of Paris, we now accompany Horacio in his journey back to Buenos Aires, in his return home, if you will, if it is possible to return home at all. So, in Paris we had that the group of friends had replaced the family. In Buenos Aires we don't have a family, we don't have a group of friends, but what we have as a unit is the couple. We have, of course, Traveler and Talita, so, Horacio's friends, and then on the other hand we do have Horacio, of course, and his girlfriend Gekrepten, who had been waiting for him all of this time, and she wants to actually settle with him. So what we have here is basically a Penelope figure, the figure of the woman who is waiting for the guy to come back, in the literal sense, to come back from Paris, but also to come back to his senses, right? And to realize, or decide what he wants to do with his life, because that's one of the problems of Horacio. Horacio is a very immature person. Horacio in Buenos Aires, and this is something characteristic of him, he does not want to talk about Paris, okay? He just doesn't want to go back to that experience. And he is just enveloped by the silence, I believe, in the second part of the novel. So, you could say that maybe if the Paris part, the first part, is about talking, it's about words, then the second part is more about action or non-action, depending on the case, because Horacio is just not saying much for us in this second part, and the things that he says sometimes are not really very meaningful. So, he may talk sometimes, but what he's saying is not really… does not really have much of a substance behind it. La Maga continues to haunt him. This is when we realize that this is a ghost story, this novel. It's really about La Maga as a ghost from the past, and “the past is never dead,” etc., etc., something that we have explored before. Check this out: when he gets back to Argentina, they work first at a circus and then at a psychiatric hospital. That's very subtle, isn't it? To me, the Buenos Aires of Rayuela is much less defined than the Paris of the novel. If you go to Paris, you can actually see the streets where Horacio walks with La Maga. You can find the neighborhoods that are mentioned. You could even follow a kind of route, the way people do in Dublin for Ulysses during Bloomsday. But Buenos Aires… I lose myself in the Buenos Aires of Rayuela. I cannot really place myself in the city. I have this edition right here that I have shown you before, the Cátedra edition, and if you look at it, at the very end of it, it comes with a map of Paris. So you can see it right here. And it helps you, you know, you can even go to the city and just follow the steps of these characters, as I was saying before. We do not get a map of Buenos Aires here. So that basically speaks volumes already. And also, as you know, the Buenos Aires section of the novel is quite shorter, it's much shorter than the Paris section. So, what I was thinking is that maybe the Buenos Aires of Rayuela is a kind of hell, or at least a kind of purgatory. There are also two long chapters in the second part of Rayuela, and the first one is chapter 41, which is the famous plank episode. Now, I wanted to ask you: is this chapter too long, or is it just me? Maybe that was Cortázar's idea, to maybe exasperate the reader. He used the same technique in his posthumous novel The Exam, or Final Exam, El examen is the title in Spanish. But in this case we have a very long episode in which we find Cortázar's sense of humor right there. Horacio is basically in one side of the… of this… of the spectrum, and then we have Traveler on the other side, and Talita is just hanging between both of them. This is literal and it is also symbolic. And the other long chapter in this part, which is the final chapter of the novel, is chapter 56, which is the barricade episode, in which we find out about Horacio's paranoia and all that it entails. This concept of the doppelganger also takes shape during this chapter, and we find out maybe that Horacio and Traveler are just two sides of the same coin. We have, on the one hand, the guy who left, and on the other hand the guy who never left. So, basically, what we have here are two different ways of looking at an Argentine person, because exile is such an important subject and such an important trope in our literature. So, Traveler and Horacio. The guy who has lived abroad, the guy who stayed. Two sides of the same coin, two versions of the Argentine person. One of the major themes would have to be, without a doubt, the fact that you cannot escape the past. This, to me, is evident. Also the idea that you cannot return home. You can't go home again, as the title of that novel goes. Another theme is that planes of existence sometimes overlap, and as I was thinking about that I was reminded of Cortázar's short story “El otro cielo,” “The Other Heaven,” in which we have, once again, an overlapping of Argentina and France. I also like a very important theme of this novel and other novels by Cortázar, and it's the fact that there is redemption in friendship. If you're looking to be saved, you know, he says, “Do not look to the family.” Or maybe he doesn't really care to explore that part of, you know, human associations. But he says, “Look for redemption in friendship.” And I think that that is Horacio’s hope, if you ask me. Once that I have read the entire novel, and I have seen the big picture, I would tell Horacio, “Yeah, just, you know, stay with your friends. Those friends care about you. That girl who has been waiting for you all this time, she cares about you. So, stay with them and try to find a meaning in life with them, because they are there to help you, and you can all, you know, you guys can all row the boat in the same direction.” Another theme that is maybe a little bit darker is this idea of madness as a different way of seeing things, as a way of seeing things that is not accepted by society. And of course, when I say “madness” I am talking, you know, between quotation marks here. Many authors have explored this idea before, but Cortázar shares with us this concept that maybe the quote-unquote “insane” person is just a person who sees the world in a way that is not accepted by the rest of society, and so he or she has to be locked up, or medicated, etc., etc. Rayuela is a reading experience that every lover of novels should have, and I would say that, in a way, how we feel about it, whether we like it, dislike it, hate it, love it, is, in a way, immaterial. This is a novel that everyone should experience, even if it is just to be able to say that you hate it. And by the way, that is completely acceptable response, and you would not be the first one to feel that way, and I think you would actually be in pretty good company. I, for my part, love Rayuela without being unaware of its shortcomings and of its problems, but isn't that what it means to love something or somebody? Knowing that they are imperfect and still being unwilling--or unable--to live without them? That's how I feel about Rayuela. Do you have any questions, comments, recommendations, recipes? Have you read Rayuela? What was your experience with it? I would love to hear your thoughts on this novel, or on anything else that Cortázar wrote. Thank you so much for stopping by, and have a wonderful day. “A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.” William Burroughs. “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” Philip K. Dick. “…su silueta delgada se inscribía en el Pont des Arts, a veces andando de un lado a otro, a veces detenida en el pretil de hierro, inclinada sobre el agua. Y era tan natural cruzar la calle, subir los peldaños del puente...” Okay. Bueno. Tengo mis dos libros acá, las dos copias de Rayuela que voy a usar... Vamos a ver cómo sale esto. A ver... Ahí va. ¿La luz está bien? ¿El enfoque? Okay. No sé si es buena idea hace esto estilo Rayuela, pero bueno, vamos a ver qué sale. “La intención es lo que cuenta.” A ver qué tal. Bueno. Acá vamos. Horacio Oliveira, an intellectual, lives in Paris. He is in a relationship with La Maga, a spontaneous young woman. They both belong to the Serpent Club, a group of expats who philosophize, talk about literature and art, and enjoy jazz music. Gregorovius, one of the members of the club, really likes La Maga. One day, La Maga's son, Rocamadour, dies. She leaves. There is speculation that she may have thrown herself into the Seine. Horacio goes back to Argentina, where he meets his friends Traveler and Talita, and begins a relationship with an old girlfriend, Gekrepten. Horacio works with Traveler and Talita at a circus and then at a psychiatric hospital. He cannot forget La Maga, and he has a nervous breakdown. His friends are there to help him. Rayuela includes four epigraphs. The first one is from a book titled Spirit of the Bible and Universal Morals, Drawn from the Old and New Testaments. One of the things that this epigraph does is to attest to the moral quality of the book. This is a book that wants you to look at life a different way and also to adopt a certain way of living life. It does not really impose a way of living life on you, but it does want you to change the way that we perceive the world around us and the way that we exist in this world. The second epigraph is by the Argentine comic writer César Bruto, and this one is really a funny epigraph. It's written in a very funny way, in a way that is different, and I think this one is a way of saying, “This novel is not like the novels that you have read so far.” This one is completely different. It's a transgressive novel, so it points to the transgressive nature of Rayuela, and at the same time this theme of wanting to be something that you're not, because that is what the epigraph is about, this idea of what would I be if I had the chance to be somebody or something else. And that is, in a way, what the protagonists of Rayuela are trying to do. Then we have a third epigraph. This one is from Jacques Vaché, okay? From a letter from Jacques Vaché to André Breton. And in this one what we have is the burden of a person who is forced or in the position of representing a certain country, which is maybe what Horacio is doing in this novel, inadvertently and against his, you know, wishes. And then, finally, we have the fourth epigraph, from Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he talks about this idea of going away from your home in order to come to love your home. That makes perfect sense. All of these point to a very important quality of Rayuela, and you could actually write just an entire essay on what Rayuela is based on these four epigraphs only. Rayuela is a novel of ideas. It is a ghost story, in a certain sense. It is a doppelganger story. You can also read it as a novel of manners, I think. It is an urban novel. It is a love story, isn't it? It is an anti-novel. You could also add “anti” to all of the previously mentioned categories. Cortázar, however, referred to it as something different: he called it a contranovela. So that would be a counternovel. I really wanted to read Rayuela when I went to France and Spain. So, I was in Paris, and I was like, “It would be a crime not to read this novel actually when I am in Paris.” Unfortunately, you know how it is when you're traveling. I didn't really get very far, maybe about a hundred pages, so I guess it's the thought that counts. And I had this copy with me, this is the one that I took on the trip, and I was looking at it the other day and I realized that there was a napkin here, inside the copy of Rayuela. And this is from a place in Spain. It's not in Paris, but in Spain. It's from a little restaurant called El Brillante, okay? It says, "Los mejores calamares de Madrid." So, what I wanted to say is this: if you ever find yourself in Madrid, please go to El Brillante and have a tostado de jamón y queso for me, okay? That is what I had, both of the times that I went there. I absolutely love these sandwiches, you know, these ham and cheese toast… toasted sandwiches. They are perfect there. So, they have three different addresses, so I'm going to include those in the description to this video, so that if you're ever in Madrid you can go and visit this place and enjoy this wonderful sandwich just like I did when I was there many years ago. I went back to Buenos Aires for the first time when I was 18 years old, after one year and a half of living here in the U.S. That going back experience was probably the most uncanny experience that I have ever had in my entire life. Everything looked smaller, grayer, closer together, older, and I was really going back to the place that I was really familiar with, to the place where I had been born, but the feelings that I experienced in that, you know, going back, were just very, very interesting and very uncomfortable for me too. When I was in Argentina, I basically took my country for granted, I'll say that, okay? I did not really explore my culture. And it was only after living here in the U.S. for a year or so, or maybe for a few months, that I began to miss my country, and I realized what I had lost. So that's one of the reasons why I felt the need to go back relatively soon after having left my country. So, after a year, after maybe two years, I began to explore the culture of Argentina outside of Argentina. So, I began to read Argentine literature, to watch Argentine movies, to listen to Argentine rock. And this is something that many of my friends who also left their countries… other different countries, right… experienced. Also, I think what we do sometimes as immigrants is to try to recreate, in a way, our patria, our homeland, outside of our country. So, it's a very interesting mechanism that takes place when you leave your country and you are forced to start a new life in a completely different culture Bueno, mi primera experiencia con Cortázar fue bastante desastrosa, en realidad. Fue en la secundaria. Me acuerdo que una maestra que tuvimos, una profesora, nos hizo leer el cuento “Circe,” que estaba incluido en este librito, que se llama Breve antología de cuentos. Tiene cuentos interesantes, porque tiene Cortázar, Asimov, Allende, Moravia, Gardini, Kordon, Villafañe. Otros autores. Y me acuerdo que nos hizo leer “Circe” la profesora. Creo que... al menos en mi caso puedo decir que realmente... nada, o sea, no entendí absolutamente nada. Fshh. Así me pasó. Y no... tengo que decir que realmente no disfruté la experiencia, pero siempre me quedó esa idea, ¿no? “Tengo que explorar la obra de Cortázar, porque Cortázar es un escritor muy importante.” Y con los años tuve la oportunidad de leerlo. Muchos años después, con ese prejuicio de pensar, “Leí un cuento y no me gustó porque no entendí nada.” Y empecé a leer los cuentos de Cortázar un año y medio, dos años después de haber estado viviendo acá en Estados Unidos, y ahí tuve una experiencia completamente diferente como lector porque yo ya había crecido también como lector. Entonces empecé a leer los cuentos de él y no pude parar. Era una cosa que era un cuento tras otro, un cuento tras otro, devorando todos los cuentos de Cortázar. Y después, bueno, durante un “spring break” decidí agarrar Rayuela, empecé a leerla, no pude parar, y realmente fue una experiencia complicada. No puedo decir que fue una experiencia genial ni una experiencia horrible ni nada por el estilo. No tengo palabras para describir la experiencia de leer Rayuela. Fue una experiencia que me cambió la vida y que me cambió como lector. Eso es lo mejor que puedo decir para describir esa sensación. A mí me encantan los cuentos de Cortázar. O sea, las novelas son muy buenas y las disfruté mucho, pero si yo tuviera que elegir, si me dijeran, “Mirá, te podés quedar con las novelas o con los cuentos. ¿Cuál de los dos elegís?” No lo pensaría dos veces. Me quedo totalmente con los cuentos. Y de las novelas, aunque reconozco la importancia de Rayuela y lo excelente que es a su manera, y lo problemática que es también, mi novela favorita de Cortázar es 62/Modelo para armar. Creo que está mucho más controlada y además tiene una filosofía detrás de la novela que me parece mucho más positiva que la de Rayuela y mucho más controlada, como digo, mucho más enfocada. Así que desde el punto de vista técnico yo diría que 62/Modelo para armar es la novela de Ray... perdón, de Cortázar con la que yo me quedaría. A pesar de que reconozco, como decía, que Rayuela es, entre comillas, “más importante.” How do you say “ballpoint pen” in Argentinian? If you go to Argentina, you're going to hear people referring to ballpoint pens as “bolígrafos” sometimes, and more often than that “lapiceras,” but there's a very specific word that we use that you can find in the original version of Rayuela and that is “birome.” Why do we call it a “birome”? Well, something that not many people know is that the ballpoint pen was invented by a Hungarian-Argentine by the name of László Jozsef Bíró. So, he invented the ballpoint pen. The patent was registered in Paris, so we have to say that this was before he went to Argentina, but then he moved to Argentina, escaping from World War II, and he started selling ballpoint pens in Argentina also. So, that is a very interesting story, and the reason why we call ballpoint pens “biromes.” There's another very important Argentine invention, and that is fingerprint identification, and the guy here, the most important guy, who started, or a pioneer of this type of identification was a guy by the name of Juan Vucetich, and he was Croatian-Argentine, okay? So, he was the first one to start with that and then it was adopted throughout the world. Now, you may say, “Well, but these two inventors were not born in Argentina.” That is part of the point. We are really a nation of immigrants. So, based on that word “birome,” that I found in my copy of Rayuela, I just wanted to share that interesting information with you. Dear Hannah: As I opened my local library's English translation of Cortázar’s Rayuela, I found an old receipt between pages 382 and 383. On April 2nd, 2022, you checked out this book, along with All Art is Propaganda. Did you enjoy the reading experience? Did you read the book linearly or non-linearly? How long did it take you to read the book? Have you read anything else by Cortázar? We do not know each other, and yet we are connected by Cortázar's great novel. We have held the same copy in our hands. Your name, I'm sure you are aware, is a palindrome. Cortázar played with palindromes in a short story titled “Satarsa.” My favorite palindrome in Spanish is “Ana lleva al oso la avellana.” “Anna takes the walnut to the bear,” but needless to say, it doesn't translate well. Interestingly, it includes one of the many possible spellings of your name. Cortázar would have been amused by the coincidence, though of course he would not have called it that. Did you forget the receipt inside the book, or did you leave it there on purpose? What are the odds that you will ever hear these words? In another story, Cortázar wrote an open letter to the actress Glenda Jackson, who appeared in a film titled Hopscotch. The story is titled “Bottle to the Sea.” That's exactly what this letter is. Best wishes, my friend. Sincerely, Jorge.