Abstract

He was almost a year older than my father. Yet when I learned of his death on February 12 in Paris I did not have the sense of an orderly passing of generations. Julio Cortázar had the personal as well as the literary ability of remaining young. It was the combination of a nimble mind, the experimental quality of his narrative, and the uncanny resilience of his lean figure to the routine ravages of time (he looked a good 25 years younger than his age). He stood tall in a generation of splendid Latin American writers. As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, he is the first figure of what is known as the Latin American boom to go