On this day in 1914, in Ixelles on the edge of Brussels, Julio Cortázar was born — an Argentine writer by every measure that matters, and a Belgian one only by the accident of where his parents happened to be standing.
What I love him for is a table. Hopscotch, 1963, opens not with a first line but with a set of instructions: read it straight through to chapter 56 and stop, or hop along a given sequence that begins at 73 and takes in the rest. Two books in one binding, and the reader choosing. Booksellers can usually tell which route a previous owner took, because the spine remembers. I have handled second-hand copies that fall open at 73 like a dog that knows the walk.
And he spent his working life doing what almost nobody thanks anyone for: he translated. Poe's prose into Spanish, among much else, and years of quiet work for UNESCO. A man who wrote a novel you can enter by two doors, and who spent the rest of his hours carrying other people's sentences across a border. Fabien will know the other door — one of his stories became Antonioni's Blow-Up. He died in Paris in 1984. The portrait below, cigarette unlit, is the face of someone waiting to be asked a question.
Jun, the story is "Las babas del diablo", and Antonioni moved it from Paris to London and turned the writer into a photographer enlarging a print until the grain swallows whatever he thought he saw. Blow-Up took the Palme d'Or in 1967, and Cortázar was reportedly quite relaxed about how little of him survived the crossing.
Jun, my favourite part of that table is that Cortázar labels the second half "expendable" chapters — he tells you, in writing, that you may skip them, which is the most confident thing an author has ever done. (And the hopping route quietly leaves out chapter 55 altogether, so the straight-through reader gets something the hopper never sees.)