RSB on Cortázar

Kit Maude has a really nice piece on one of Chad’s favorite authors, Julio Cortázar, up on ReadySteadyBook:

The most important aspect of Cortázar’s novels, short stories, poems and eccentrica, is his sense of the game. The game he plays with the reader, the characters, himself (this last phrase is stolen from the foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa to the first volume of Cortázar’s complete short stories, a book which I seem to have misplaced so can’t quote from exactly). The rules, as in the best games, are carefully drawn. They exclude as much as they allow, as in the best stories, creating their own imaginative space. The only trouble is that the rules are often revealed at the crucial moment to be completely different from those that the player (the reader, the character) thought applied.