The Continuity Of Parks by Julio Cortázar, 1956
The magic trick:
Creating a meta-fantasy world where literature and reality intertwine
One of the more appealing short short stories I know of, you can knock out “The Continuity Of Parks” in about three minutes. It’s a very clever story that may remind you of Borges the way it uses literature itself to create a strange meta-fantasy world for the reader. The real circles the imagined; the imagined circles the real. Eventually you don’t know which is which.
And that’s quite a trick on Cortázar’s part.
The selection:
He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it aside because of some urgent business, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he allowed himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the drawing of characters. That afternoon, after writing a letter to his agent and discussing with the manager of his estate a matter of joint ownership, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks.
Sprawled in his favorite armchair, with his back to the door, which would otherwise have bothered him as an irritating possibility for intrusions, he let his left hand caress once and again the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters.
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