La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos

by · 1967

Genre: History

Rating: 4.2/5

Cortázar’s essays are less an argument than a series of luminous detours. Uneven, yes, but alive in the way only serious play can be.

Cortázar turns the essay into a cabinet of side doors, and most of them open onto wonder.

La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos is not a history book in any ordinary sense, and that matters: it is a record of a mind moving through art, literature, music, memory, politics, and private obsession without asking permission. Cortázar is at his best when he treats criticism as a form of play with stakes, not a dutiful exercise in summary. The result is uneven, but the unevenness is part of the charge.

If you come to this book expecting a tidy sequence of arguments, you will be disappointed in the most useful way. Cortázar writes by attraction rather than plan: a painting leads to a story, a jazz rhythm to a digression, a cat to metaphysics, and a passing absurdity to a small philosophical ambush. He has the rare critic’s gift of making taste feel like intelligence. Even when he is merely riffing, he is doing something harder than reviewing: he is showing how a sensibility is built. The pages move fast because they are driven by curiosity, which is still the best engine nonfiction has.

What makes the book endure is Cortázar’s refusal to flatten culture into hierarchy. High art, pulp, games, children’s fictions, urban drifting, European formality, Latin American invention: he keeps refusing the partitions that keep criticism respectable and dull. There is a pleasure in the seriousness with which he treats the unserious, and the unseriousness with which he treats the solemn. He can sound giddy, but he is never sloppy. Even his oddities feel earned, as if he has found the only scale large enough for the materials he loves.

The best passages have the texture of someone thinking in public and trusting the reader to keep up. You get a sense of the larger Cortázar project here: to expand the permissible territory of literature, and to make the reader feel that expansion as a bodily event. He is often funniest when he is most exact, and most exact when he seems to be wandering. That is not a contradiction in his hands. It is the method. Few essayists can make a remark about a painting, a joke about bureaucracy, and a meditation on memory feel like parts of the same weather system.

Still, the book’s freedom has a cost. Cortázar can be so delighted by his own circuits of association that the reader occasionally loses the thread, or suspects there was never a thread to lose. Some pieces depend on the density of their moment more than their afterlife, which means not every digression lands with the same force on a first, or a later, reading. And because the book values improvisation so highly, it can sometimes feel closed to readers who don’t already share Cortázar’s cultural coordinates. The result is invigorating, but also a little insular: the dazzling clubhouse problem.

That said, the book matters because it preserves a model of criticism that has become rarer: criticism as adventure, as risk, as style with conviction. In a literary culture that too often rewards explanation over perception, Cortázar insists on the opposite. He does not merely tell you what to think about art; he changes the tempo at which you encounter it. That is a real achievement. La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos is not the most disciplined essay collection, but it is one of the liveliest. It remembers that thought should have pulse.

Key Takeaways

Summary

Chapter Guide

Chapter 1: Opening meditations on reading and writing
Cortázar begins by treating criticism as a form of roaming: books, authors, and reading habits become excuses for thought. The tone is playful, but the target is serious: how literature makes and remakes attention.
Chapter 2: Portraits of writers and artistic allies
Several sections sketch fellow writers, painters, and cultural companions through admiration, mischief, and selective biography. Cortázar is less interested in completeness than in the living spark each figure gives off.
Chapter 3: Jazz, rhythm, and improvisation
Jazz appears as both subject and method: syncopation, surprise, and improvisation shape the prose itself. The essays ask what literature can borrow from music without becoming merely decorative.
Chapter 4: Paris, travel, and the geometry of cities
Cities are read as emotional maps, especially Paris, where movement, memory, and displacement constantly overlap. Travel here is not tourism: it is a way of testing the self against streets, rooms, and weather.
Chapter 5: The bizarre and the comic uncanny
Cortázar repeatedly turns toward strange figures, tiny shocks, and absurdly specific images: cats, monsters, odd bodies, impossible habits. These pieces insist that the marvelous is not elsewhere; it is lodged in ordinary perception.

Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/6a06933967b7ef01e2cb961a/la-vuelta-al-d-a-en-ochenta-mundos

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