Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

In prep for my next book project, I’m reading some authors whose styles I want to understand better. The first author on my list was Alice Hoffman, and my second is Julio Cortázar.

I turned to Cortázar primarily because of one story I read many years ago. “Axolotl” was a story of such unusual structure and style that it has stuck with me for decades, after only a single reading. This alone is enough do draw me back to it, in this preliminary phase, but its structure also has something I’ve been thinking about for the structure of my next book: shifting POV.

Cortázar’s prose and style is impossible to nail down. Each story in this so different from the others. At times, I thought I found an overarching method, only to find something radically different in the next story. If there is anything that does pertain to all of Cortázar’s stories here, it is density. And by density, I don’t mean that his prose is opaque and hard to understand. To the contrary, his prose is clear, but full of detail, full of depth, and (harkening back to my one recent revelation) full of history and backstory.

Stylistically and structurally, the stories are all very different. He moves easily from the introspective, cerebral, almost Proustian style of “Axolotl” to a combination of eerie, Gothic reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers mixed with flash-fiction in “The Continuity of Parks.” There is whimsy and tragedy mixed in equal measure in “A Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” and a much more straightforward style is used in “Blow-up.”

As I mentioned, many of the stories use a shifting POV, which is of interest to me for my next book. Cortázar slips effortlessly from one POV to the next, sometimes within the same sentence. In “Axolotl” this is especially evident, and a fascinating study in style. Told in first person, it is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with the axolotls in the aquarium at Les Jardins de Plantes in Paris. He watches them every day, for hours at a time, staring at them, wondering about their existence, feeling a connection, a personal connection between himself and the strange, pink, golden-eyed creatures behind the glass. Subtly at first, but with increasing purposefulness, Cortázar starts to shift the POV from the man looking at the creatures, to the axolotls looking at the man. Except these are not two separate, distinct POVs; they are the same POV, moving between the two existences.

Deconstructed to its mechanics, Cortázar’s method is simple: He simply (at least in this translation) replaces the “I” of the man with the “we” of the axolotls at certain points, but the mechanics do not describe the art of it. The art comes in the where and the how Cortázar uses this mechanism, and it was surprising to me how early he begins this shift. But, like any good foreshadowing, the reader’s eye will pass over the clue, not realizing it is a clue, until later on.

This has been another good addition to my education as a writer, but these styles that I want to emulate are so different from my own that I fear I will have to practice at them for a while before I become adequately adept to use them successfully.

k