Bestiary by Julio Cortázar, 1951
The magic trick:
Combining surrealism with a story about what’s left unsaid
Brace yourself for a frustrating, difficult read.
You will likely sense that you are only getting 30, maybe 40 percent of the story. Which of course is by design. It’s a story about what goes unspoken in the average middle class family home, so it makes sense that much of the story itself is left to the reader’s inference.
That alone would be literary device enough to keep the reader challenged.
Layer in the surrealism – have we mentioned that a tiger lives inside this house? – and you have a very complicated story, indeed.
And that’s quite a trick on Cortázar’s part.
The selection:
It got hotter, by ten-thirty you couldn’t breathe. The children stayed with Rema in the inside dining room, the men were in their studies. Nino was the first to say that he was getting sleepy.
“Go on up by yourself, I’ll come see you later. Everything is all right upstairs.” And Rema took him about the waist with that expression he liked so well.
“Tell us a story, Aunt Rema?”
“Another night.”
They were down there alone, with the mantis which looked at them. Luis came to say his goodnights to them, muttering something about the hour that children ought to go to bed, Rema smiled at him when she kissed him.
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