Madrid, June 16 (EFE).- The literature of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar remains fully current due to its modernity, its quality in writing and sales that remain stable every year, according to figures from the literary field in the tribute to the author. held at the Madrid Book Fair.
As a writer, Cortázar had a prolific career that includes titles such as ‘Hopscotch’, ‘Bestiario’, ‘The Examination’, ‘Historias de Cronopios y Famas’ and ‘Un tal Lucas’, among many others, but his role as a storyteller stands out. .
In a conference he gave in Cuba, Cortázar said that “the novel always wins by points, while the story must win by knock-out” and revealed his love for boxing, which is also present in his work.
In this sense, the Spanish actress Clara Sanchis assured EFE that the Argentinean’s stories are infinite and unfathomable: “you can find a completely realistic, exciting story that moves you; you can find another surreal, dreamlike; another tremendously political and combative. Suddenly it touches on personal, small themes, from an almost fantasy world.”
The Spanish poet and novelist Benjamín Prado, the Spanish actress Clara Sanchis and the Argentine writer Andrea Stefanoni highlighted the relevance that the author has today, in a talk in which they reviewed his work, the different styles he explored and his influences.
The editorial director of Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes, revealed that ‘Rayuela’ is one of the best-selling books every year by the publisher, so “that means that Cortázar continues to be contemporary.”
Along these lines, the Spanish poet and novelist Benjamín Prado said that the Argentine is a writer of great validity and novelty: “certainly one of the most modern and the one that is easiest to continue believing in.”
For his part, Sanchis considered that the validity is due to the fact that the writer has enormous quality at all levels: “There are artists who are very good, who have enormous quality and who therefore are still there. Can we say that Mozart stops interesting us? No, he never ceases to interest us.”
‘Hopscotch’, one of Julio Cortázar’s most recognized works, was published for the first time 61 years ago, in June 1963, and managed to captivate a large audience around the world.
This novel has a playful character, a particularity that is present in all of the Argentine writer’s work and, in this sense, Sanchís assured that “Cortázar always moves you, he is always shaking you with those types of games.”
He also recalled that the first time he tried to read ‘Hopscotch’ was when he was 12 years old, but it was “impossible”, so he tried again when he was 20 years old and that time “it was exciting.”
For Prado, Julio Cortázar is characterized by continually appealing to the reader and in Rayuela he demonstrates it: “it is a novel that he wrote because he thought that, sometimes, the reader’s position with respect to the book is passive. “He wanted to make books where the reader had to take a constructive attitude and had to participate in the development of the novel.”
In this tribute, the Argentine boxer and actor Sergio ‘Maravilla’ Martínez was in charge of performing a dramatized reading of the story ‘Torito’, which narrates the life of the Argentine boxer Justo Suárez, known as ‘El torito de Mataderos’.EFE
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