Author: Cortazar, Julio.
Publisher: Real Academia Española
Pages:1120
A new commemorative edition by the Real Academia Española and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language: Rayuela, a masterpiece of contemporary Spanish-language literature. An undisputed milestone in 20th-century fiction that continues to draw in new readers. In the context of the 7th International Congress of the Spanish Language in the Argentine city of Córdoba in March, 2019, this edition pays homage to one of the most important Spanish-language authors of all time and his most emblematic work, which shook the cultural landscape of his era and which still attracts new readers even today. The publication of Rayuela in 1963 signified a true revolution in Spanish-language fiction: for the first time, a writer fully broke the rules about the order and language in which a story should be told. Brimming with literary and vital ambition, reforming narrative techniques, and breaking down genres and conventions, Rayuela is the essence of Cortázar, with all his ethical and aesthetic complexities, with his imagination and his humor. As a complement to the novel, this edition contains three masterful pieces by Gabriel García Márquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Carlos Fuentes, contemporaries of Julio Cortázar, that shed light on the author’s dimension and the reception the novel had in its time. It also includes works by writers Mario Vargas Llosa and Sergio Ramírez, and by critics Julio Ortega, Andrés Amorós, Eduardo Romano, and Graciela Montaldo, showing the timelessness of Cortázar’s narrative approach. In addition, for the first time since 1983, it includes a reproduction of the “Log book,” the notebook in which Cortázar noted ideas, scenes, and characters for the novel during the writing process. Like one of those games that Cortázar liked so much, this notebook allows a dialogue between the author and the reader that breaks the barriers of time. Readers might emerge from this book with a different idea about how to read books and how to view life. It is, without a doubt, a mosaic in which an entire era is marvelously reflected.