All Fires the Fire

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.

This incredible book of short stories depicts the profound intricacies and the rich variety of human passions, but it does so most particularly in "Todos los fuegos el fuego", the short story that gives its name to the book. Cortazar's talent as a writer allows him to mask his themes behind a cunning phrasing of words, which may cause surprise at times, and which provide the reader with the enormous pleasure of interpreting them, recreating the stories alongside with him.Cortazar displays, throughout these stories, his particular way of envisioning reality, and yet his conclusions, masked as literary metaphors or writing techniques, rise to become universal in the end, proving all of us that however unique we may feel, we still have our passions, our sufferings, and solitudes, in common. The ordinary aspects of life always vanish with Cortazar, giving way to the unexpected.