(Brussels,
1914 - Paris, 1984) Argentine writer. Son of Argentinian parents, when he was
four years old Julio Cortázar moved with them to Argentina, to radicate himself
in the andean province of Mendoza. After completing his primary school, he
continued with the magistery and letters ones and he was a rural teacher for
five years.
He later moved to Buenos Aires, and in 1951 he travelled to Paris with a
scholarship. When the scholarship ended, his work as a Unesco translator
allowed him to definately stay in the French capital. By then, Julio Cortázar
had already published the book of poems Presencia under the pseudoname of
"Julio Denis" in Buenos Aires, the dramatic poem "Los
Reyes" and the first of his short stories series, "Bestiario",
where the great influence of Jorge Luis Borges can be noticed. Cortázar''s
literature commences from the vital inquiry, close to the existentialist
premises, in works of a marked experimental character, that converted him into
one of the greatest innovators of language and narrative in Spanish language.
As in Borges, his stories deepen in the fantastic, but without abandoning the
reference to the day to day reality, this is why his works always end up owing
something to surrealism. For Cortázar, the immediate reality means an access
way to other registries of the real, where life plenitude reaches multiple
formulations. That is why his narrative constitutes a permanent inquiry to
reason and to the conventional schemes of thought. The instinct, the fate, the
joy of senses, the humour and the game end up identifying themselves with the
writing, that at the same time is the world''s existence formulation. The
ruptures of the chronological and spatial orders take the reader out of his/her
conventional point of view, proposing new possibilities of participation, in
such way that the reading act is needed to complete the narrative universe.