The literary POV shifts between first and third person, complementing a plot in which a moment frozen in time captured on film comes to suggest infinite possibilities of truth rather than authorizing a single explanation, as might be expected.
The titular game is an imaginary one played by three young cousins near the railroad tracks by their house in rural Argentina.
The game is an elaborately constructed fictional world involving costumes and passengers on the train. The game takes a strange turn when a young commuter named Ariel starts dropping notes off the train for the girls. He takes a special interest in Letitia, who suffers from a chronic spinal condition that keeps her bed-bound a lot of the time.
Ariel wants to meet Letitia, but instead, he writes him a letter explaining her condition which is handed off to him by her cousins. After reading the letter, Ariel no longer faces them on the train when he passes from Tigre. The Question and Answer section for Julio Cortazar: Short Stories is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
When the house is breached the first time and the intruders take over half the house on the other side of the mahogany door, there is no discussion of recourse between the narrator and Irene. They don't consider retaliation or calling authorities For example, he doesn't attend the English school; he attends an industrial school.
And he isn't as confident as his note-throwing would suggest. He repeatedly asks after Letitia, and when a lull in the conversation makes it clear that he's very disappointed about not meeting her, Holanda hands him the letter Letitia wrote. He doesn't read it in front of them, but eventually makes his way back to the station.
The next day, Letitia performs the most magnificent Statue they'd ever seen her perform. She sneaks her mother's jewels out of the house and wears them for the Statue this is a very big deal, and neither the narrator nor Holanda is remotely comfortable with the idea of taking the jewels out of the house. Ariel sees them from the train and stares at Letitia the whole time he's passing. Then the narrator and Holanda help Letitia stuff the jewels back in her pockets, and she starts home before them as they pack up the garment box.
Letitia stays at the house the next day, exhausted from a new treatment therapy, and when Holanda and the narrator make their usual trek to the tracks, they're unsurprised to find Ariel's usual window empty.
Holanda predicts that the whole ordeal with Ariel will mark the end of their game. His narrator offers conflicting accounts of how she, herself, views Letitia's privileges and disadvantages in light of her own. Of Letitia, the narrator first says, early on in the story, "she was the luckiest and most privileged of the three of us. Letitia didn't have to dry dishes or make the beds, she could laze away the day reading or pasting up pictures, and at night they let her stay up later if she asked to, not counting having a room to herself, special hot broth when she wanted it, and all kinds of other advantages" As the story progresses, however, the narrator recognizes the suffering that Letitia has to endure because of her medical condition.
She says things like, "what I really would have wanted was that Letitia not suffer; she had enough to put up with and now the new treatment and all those things" , so there is a definite attempt at empathy, but the narrator and Holanda both at times espouse a childish, unapologetic jealousy of Letitia for her so-called "privileges" without considering the debilitating pain and impediments that accompany her condition—an oversight that is understandable, given that they are children.
The narrator says, "in a household where there's someone with some physical defect and a lot of pride, everyone pretends to ignore it starting with the one who's sick, or better yet, they pretend they don't know that the other one knows" Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Sometimes I like his writing, sometimes it is wonderful nap material.
But, there is a but. Some of his short stories may start really slow, may have a lot of tedious details that makes me want to finish the whole thing right away, however, in the last paragraph, or in the last two lines, he changes everything. And suddenly, because I was not paying too much attention to what I thought were boring details, I find myself lost. And it is amazing. Most of the times. Some other times, I still do not get it, so I have to do a little research, if my interpretation makes no sense at all.
That happened with a short story called "No se culpe a nadie". How long can you write about view spoiler [a pullover? On and on about a pullover, hands, hands, wool, hands, drool.
And you begin to understand a little bit more until you arrive to your own interpretation. You usually see things that the author did not actually write. He might have other intentions that you did not see. And maybe, if it really interests you, you will obsessively look for the real meaning if it is explained because you want to know what was in that writer's head. And then contemplate both, amazed, because a single story can create many different points of view.
And when I say "you", yes I mean me. And bigger gems like "La noche boca arriba", where dreams and reality seems to be the same, and "Axolotl". A story about one of the creepiest living things I have ever seen. Darme cuenta de eso fue en el primer momento como el horror del enterrado vivo que despierta a su destino.
To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. You never know where you are standing, until you finish reading the story. He created his own playful, weird, twisted, complicated, beautiful and nostalgic style. To me, there is a sense of home that never goes away. Yes, a warm homey feeling, a bit different from, for example, Borges, a favorite of mine, whose work tends to be more philosophical, equally complicated.
They both play with reality and dreams until those boundaries disappear completely. They do it in their own brilliantly unique ways. Two of the finest examples of Latin American literature. View all 12 comments. May 14, M. After a bunch of books I didn't really enjoy that much, this is finally one of the books I can say I really enjoyed.
And I can say it without hesitating at all. My first contact with him was thanks to a tale from it, "Continuidad de los parques" Continuity of the Parks in which a reader has quite an unusual experience from the point of narrative, but as soon as we After a bunch of books I didn't really enjoy that much, this is finally one of the books I can say I really enjoyed. My first contact with him was thanks to a tale from it, "Continuidad de los parques" Continuity of the Parks in which a reader has quite an unusual experience from the point of narrative, but as soon as we get through it, we manage to see it's a perfect description of what happens when a book really gets our attention and we get inside the story.
The tales are, as always surrounded by this apparently simple and daily language that breaks as soon as we try to interpret what it's being said. I knew some of the works exposed here, as I previously mentioned. Despite being one of his earliest works when it comes to prose, it still has that charm that made his style so particuarly attractive, not only for argentine people but for the circle of people that like his literature all around the world.
If this is frustrating to the reader, perhaps it is supposed to be. When he introduces the character, he refers to the character only as he , no name, and provides an explanation—"because for himself, for just going along thinking, he did not have a name" The extreme compression and omission of "The Night Face Up" necessitates the third-person perspective.
The story begins as the man is removing his motorcycle from storage and going for a ride. The reader is given no background information about the character and knows nothing about his life outside of the present moment, and by the end of the story, we realize that this is actually because there may not be any background or reality outside this present moment.
The Question and Answer section for Julio Cortazar: Short Stories is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. When the house is breached the first time and the intruders take over half the house on the other side of the mahogany door, there is no discussion of recourse between the narrator and Irene. They don't consider retaliation or calling authorities How does this Story Create Suspense?
What can you infer about the family from the description of the house in first two paragraphs?
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