All Fires the Fire

I ordered this by request of a Brazilian friend who thought I needed to expand my reading material a little more internationally. I loved the stories and thought that the arrival was fantastic! It didn't take long to get here. Highly recommended read.

Eight stories with a touch of magical realism, like his countryman Borges. Cortazar was born in Argentina, but like so many other Latin American authors, left for Paris in his late thirties and died there in 1984.In the title story, two stories are juxtaposed: scenes of a Roman gladiator fighting for his life in an arena with modern scenes from a man on the phone with his wife, girlfriend at his side. Both stories end in conflagrations.Another story starts with a week-long traffic jam in Paris. As food runs short and some older folks die without medical help, people start to re-create society. They organize themselves into local tribes; some help others and share their food; others steal and sell for profit.A family conspires to keep the news of the death of a brother from their elderly, critically ill mother. They think they succeed so well that they end up fooling themselves more than the mother.A band of brothers fight in the Spanish Civil War; their comradery and feeling for each other offers some solace from what will be futility as the enemy closes in around them.A young married nurse falls in love with a much younger, awkward boy who is terminally ill.An airline steward flies over the Mediterranean each day and becomes obsessed with a certain island he repeatedly sees from the air. He quits his job, moves to the island and experiences tragedy.A man continues to seek the company of a prostitute even after he has become engaged. He offers her protection from a serial killer preying on the night women. When the killer is caught and he is ready to marry and be faithful, he sees a life of emptiness ahead of him.A man in a theatre is pulled out of the audience and forced to play a part in a stage drama. He goes along with the expected role for the first act but he ad-libs in later acts with dire consequences.Pretty good stories but not up to those of the master.

My favorite Cortazar short story is "The Southern Thruway" with its hilariously dry epigraph:Sweltering motorists do not seem to have a history...As a reality a traffic jam is impressive, but it doesn't say much.-Arrigo Benedetti, L'Espresso, Rome, 6.21.64Cortazar reminds me of Kafka and Nabokov, Calvino and of course Borges, but also of an author who came after him Antonio Tabucchi who also writes strange stories.Cortazar like these others is known for being a fabulist, an inventor of worlds, and he is, but what makes any fiction wonderful is how true it is. Sometimes the fantastic is a more direct route to the real nature of reality than is the more obvious realist one. Thats not to say Cortazar writes sci fi but just that he always approaches the world in a way that is surprising and so he renders the ordinary extraordinary better even than those that I mentioned along side of him. Some of the stories are light and some dark and they all have the allure of upsetting the normal flow of things which we know as reality, at which time the curious begin to question the nature of that reality and perhaps in their questioning begin to search among the wreckage of the old reality for a different kind of order, one that no one had previously thought existed. What better task is there for an author or reader than to search for new realities?Originally published in 1966, English edition 1973.

Like a soft bag bag full of marbles; each piece in this well-crafted collection of short fiction is tight, translucent, and colorful as a glass ball. Cortezar's short fiction is better focused than his longer work, specifically Hopscotch which I found slightly gimmiky and annoying. This work, however manages to be incredibly solid and satisfying without being shallow or facile (a difficult task). Cortezar's style here is reminiscent of some of the short fiction of Italo Calvino encapsulating that same sense of crushingly beautiful tragi-comedy that leaves you wondering wether you're awake or asleep. The stories range in subject from a family trying to protect an aging mother from the death of her son by keeping up a false correspondence for years to a man who falls in love during a three-month traffic jam just outside of Paris. Cortezar explores the same old stuff in the stories: the complexity of human relationships, the bizarre quirks of tenderness, everyone's ultimate solitude. The thing is: he does it in a way that makes me examine "the same old stuff" in a new way; like looking into the tiny bubbles in the glass of that marble. Really, he says in words something that cannot be said in words. If that makes any sense. The work is funny and lovely and surprising and, on the whole, one of the finest collections of short fiction I have found.

Expected something better both in style and substance.