Reader for Manuel

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) was an outstanding Argentine prose writer and poet of the 20th century, one of the representatives of the direction of Latin American literature known as “magical realism”. Gabriel García Márquez admitted that in his youth he dreamed of “learning to write like Julio”.

The postmodern political novel “A Reader for Manuel” (1973), the last work of this genre in the writer’s work, is a novel-collage, a kind of “book within a book”. Young Latin Americans Patricio and Susanna, living in Paris in the early 1970s, create a reader for their son Manuel by pasting newspaper clippings into an album. The author’s focus, as usual, is on philosophy, the meaning of life, love, and the purpose of man. And, as in practically all of his works, Cortázar does not put the final point: choosing the ending of a book, like the ending of life, is the prerogative of the reader...