He soon began to feel asphyxiated by the narrowness of family life, he explained, when for example his relatives threw a party to celebrate their acquisition of a refrigerator. Though Cortázar described to Graciela de Sola his early life in a big, animal-filled garden as paradise, he added that this memory is tinged by excessive sensitivity and frequent sadness. Something similar is true of the complex dual perspective of novels by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier such as Los pasos perdidos (1953 translated as The Lost Steps, 1956).Ĭortázar was brought up with his sister, Ofelia, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Bánfield after their father abandoned the family. Without the European perspective, however, and the wide, eclectic European culture that is the hallmark of the Argentinian intellectual, novels such as Rayuela (1963 translated as Hopscotch, 1966) would not have been possible.

When he returned to Europe for good at the age of thirty-seven, his destiny as an essentially Argentinian and Latin-American writer was set. As Joaquin Marco stated in El Cultural, “exploring this course is to dive into Cortázar designing his own creations….Born on 26 August 1914 to Argentinian parents, Julio José Cortázar and María Herminia Descotte de Cortázar, who were in Brussels on a business trip during the German invasion, Cortázar did not travel to Argentina until four years later.

He covers such topics as “the writer’s path” (“while my aesthetic world view made me admire writers like Borges, I was able to open my eyes to the language of street slang, lunfardo”) and the fantastic (“unbeknownst to me, the fantastic had become as acceptable, as possible and real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening”), Literature Class provides the amazingly warm and personal experience of sitting in a room with this fantastically inventive author. These classes are as much reflections on Cortázar’s own writing-“in my work I look for solutions as problems arise”-as musings about literature. “I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist'-so begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. A master class from the exhilarating writer Julio Cortázar Literature Class Literature

62 by Julio Cortázar