Axolotl by Julio Cortázar, 1956
The magic trick:
Hooking the reader with a surprising – and strange – reveal in the first paragraph
Tough to know what Cortázar is up to here. It’s weird even by his standards.
And it’s all there in the first paragraph:
“There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.”
Now, you might argue the story peaks too early with that last sentence of the first paragraph. It’s quite a moment for the reader.
The rest of the story is left to fill in the details beyond that initial shock. And it acquits itself nicely of the task, but there’s no denying that first reveal is the best part.
Great way to hook a reader.
And that’s quite a trick on Cortázar’s part.
The selection:
It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Glueing my face to the glass (the guard would cough fussily once in a while), I tried to see better those diminutive golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of these rosy creatures. It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy.
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