ALL FIRES THE FIRE
AND OTHER STORIES
I think this is the best of the Pantheon Cortázar jackets. The designer is again Kenneth Miyamoto, who had created the jacket for 62: A Model Kit, but the painting on the cover is Paul Klee's The North Sea. The way the central swath vanishes in the distance always makes me think of "The Southern Thruway," one of the eight stories included inside, even though it's an empty beach rather than a superhighway jammed with vacationers returning to Paris.
The back cover features that wonderfully over-the-top Neruda quote: Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.
Gregory Rabassa was once again the translator. This edition was published in September 1973, the same month that Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile and the same month that Neruda died.
Posted by Chris Kearin at 7:13 PM
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
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