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A review by jimmylorunning
Blow-up, and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
4.0
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the story "Axolotl". When I envied those rhythms, their faint movements, those sentences in particular, intimate, slightly illogical, thought-like vectors achieving a rolling quality that is not like a sentence at all. Yes, above all I envied Cortazar's sentences, which are unique in their grammatical messiness, their organic connections, the imperceptible consequences of unfolding. Those days I read "Axolotl" obsessively, drunk on the sound of "Ambystoma", "Port Royal", and "an indifferent immobility", sometimes three or four times a day, captured by that minute looking, that description in which the words are just a cake of dust upon what is actually a chthonic--slow--turning over and over. Often I would drift off while reading, and they would enter my dreams, the axolotls and the sentences both, together.
"Axolotl" is probably the best story in this collection. The sentences are what I fell in love with first, but Cortazar is preoccupied with other notions. With the idea of becoming the Other, switching identities, with time, with perception. Most of these concepts, dare I say it, are weights that hinder his gifts, yes sometimes even gimmicks. Once you read one story, you begin to see the pattern and start looking for it, which is incredibly distracting, especially when you're trying to focus your eyes on those mysterious sentences at the bottom of the tank. But the particulars, that is where these stories sit implacable, where the concept cannot infringe. I insist that these stories do not need to be weighed down by such concepts, that they should live alone at the level of the sentence, that they need to be freed from the constraints of expectation.
"Axolotl" is probably the best story in this collection. The sentences are what I fell in love with first, but Cortazar is preoccupied with other notions. With the idea of becoming the Other, switching identities, with time, with perception. Most of these concepts, dare I say it, are weights that hinder his gifts, yes sometimes even gimmicks. Once you read one story, you begin to see the pattern and start looking for it, which is incredibly distracting, especially when you're trying to focus your eyes on those mysterious sentences at the bottom of the tank. But the particulars, that is where these stories sit implacable, where the concept cannot infringe. I insist that these stories do not need to be weighed down by such concepts, that they should live alone at the level of the sentence, that they need to be freed from the constraints of expectation.