Axolotl
A man who makes a habit of visiting the aquarium each day to see the axolotls one day becomes one. The story develops a dual narrative, presenting life seen from either the human or the animal point of view. The difficulty is that Cortazar offers no signposts to determine when the perspective has changed. This shift in perspective feeds the theme that art can become a way for creatures to connect and end their isolation from each other.
House Taken Over
As might be expected, Cortazar’s take on a haunted house story is unique. For the most part, this is a rather static tale of a brother and sister living out their lives in solitude in their ancestral home. Suspense and tension emerges with the intrusion of a mysterious and unexplained (perhaps supernatural) presence that slowly begins to take ownership of the home. First the brother and sister are relegated to using just one wing; eventually, they are cast out of the home entirely.
Continuity of Parks
This story follows the movements of an estate owner as he returns to his estate from several pressing business meetings. He's engaged with reading a novel, first on the train, and then in his study, back at the estate. The novel's plot and characters wash over him, and the story switches perspective to that of the novel's characters. The "hero" of the novel walks out of the woods and onto an estate. He breaks into the estate's house, walks through the rooms, knife in hand, and arrives at the study, where he sees the estate owner reading a book.
The Night Face Up
A man has an accident while riding his motorcycle and is rushed into surgery at the local hospital. While recuperating, he dreams of being an ancient member of the Motecan tribe being chased by Aztec warriors. As the Aztecs finally catch up to him and begin preparing him for a human sacrifice, he awakes—only to fall back again into the dream world, an ending that provides a postmodern twist suggesting that the dream is actually what the reader took to be the "real world," and that the man's reality is that he is a Motecan fleeing the Aztecs during the war of the blossom.
Bestiary
Isabel spends a summer of her childhood at the Funes estate, where an uncaged tiger roams. Despite the presence of this dangerous wild animal, it is business as usual with everyone being kept informed of the tiger’s whereabouts so they can avoid that area of the house. As she grows accustomed to the presence of the tiger, Isabel becomes aware of the human drama of the Funes family, the way The Kid terrorizes his wife, Rema, and nephew, Nino. The Kid's character becomes a parallel to the threatening presence of the tiger, and in the end, Isabel (either by intentional misdirection or careless mistake) directs the kid to the library, where he is mauled by the tiger.
Blow-Up
Adapted into one of the most influential British films of the 1960s, "Blow-Up" is an excellent example of the postmodernist fragmentation of narrative that defines much of Cortazar’s work. In a story in which the prevailing theme is that of perception versus reality and the ambiguous relationship between truth and fact, the narrator draws attention to the fact that he is writing a story, and then takes this to the next level by first introducing the main character—a photographer—and then becoming him. The literary POV shifts between first and third person, complementing a plot in which a moment frozen in time captured on film comes to suggest infinite possibilities of truth rather than authorizing a single explanation, as might be expected.
End of the Game
The titular game is an imaginary one played by three young cousins near the railroad tracks by their house in rural Argentina. The game is an elaborately constructed fictional world involving costumes and passengers on the train. The game takes a strange turn when a young commuter named Ariel starts dropping notes off the train for the girls. He takes a special interest in Letitia, who suffers from a chronic spinal condition that keeps her bed-bound a lot of the time. Ariel wants to meet Letitia, but instead, he writes him a letter explaining her condition which is handed off to him by her cousins. After reading the letter, Ariel no longer faces them on the train when he passes from Tigre.
