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Final Exam

Name: Final Exam
Author: Julio Cortázar
ISBN: 9780811214179

by Julio Cortázar, Alfred MacAdam (Translator), Alfred Mac Adam

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Overview

In its characters, themes, and preoccupations, Final Exam prefigures Cortázar's later fictions, including Blow-Up and his masterpiece, Hopscotch. Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), it is Cortázar's allegorical, bitter, and melancholy farewell to an Argentina from which he was about to be permanently self-exiled. (Cortázar moved to Paris the following year.)

The setting of Final Exam is a surreal Buenos Aires, dark and eerie, where a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students, meet up with their friends Andrés and Stella, as well as a journalist friend they call "the chronicler." Juan and Clara are getting ready to take their final exams, but instead of preparing, they wander the city with their friends, encounter strange happenings in the squares and ponder life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.

With its daring typography, its shifts in rhythm as well as in the wildly veering directions of its characters' thoughts and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. It is considered one of Cortázar's best works.

Synopsis

One of Julio Cortázar's great early novels. "Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed."—Pablo Neruda

Worldview -

[A] major undiscovered work...a novel about Buenos Aires which one night turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

About the Author, Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), Argentine novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer, was born in Brussels, and moved permanently to France in 1951. Cortazar is now recognized as one of the century's major experimental writers, reflecting the influence of French surrealism,
psychoanalysis, and his love of both photography and jazz, along with his strong commitment to revolutionary Latin American politics.

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Editorials

From The Critics

[A] major undiscovered work...a novel about Buenos Aires which one night turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
—Worldview

Harry Morales

[A] major undiscovered work...a novel about Buenos Aires which one night turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
—Worldview

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Before Julio Cortazar emigrated to Paris in the '50s, where he composed his masterpiece, Hopscotch, he spent his apprentice years writing essays in Buenos Aires for a magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges. The '40s in Argentina were politically dominated by the Perons and culturally dominated by European modernism. This novel, written in 1950, although first published in 1985, is tossed by both currents. Two couples, Juan and Clara and Andres and Stella, wander the streets of Buenos Aires the night before their final college examination. This particular night, Buenos Aires is an unreal city. A kind of pestiferous fog, or maybe smoke, has rolled in. Odd, perhaps poisonous, mushrooms are sprouting everywhere. Rumors circulate of some unspecified civil breakdown, and a very strange event is underway at the Plaza de Mayo. A bone is being exhibited in a tent there, and people are lined up to see it. The couples are brought into contact with other night owls--notably a character called the Chronicler, a journalist, who is full of gossip. Juan and Clara are also being stalked by a former friend, Abel, for reasons unmentioned. The next day, Juan and Clara go with Clara's father, Mr. Funes, to hear a concert performed by a blind violinist. While there, Funes gets into an altercation in the men's room. This fractured, impressionistic novel shows Cortazar's immense learning--the narrative is full of literary references to writers from Poe to Andre Malraux--but he had not yet mastered novelistic form. Still, for students of Cortazar's work, this book presents in prototype what will later be his great theme: how the disjunctions of urban life can be expressed in symbols of vague dread. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.