This book was my first experience with reading Cortazar. From the first story on, the excitement of encountering a new (to me) brilliant writer went through me like an electric shock. The book injected an excitement and alertness into what otherwise might have been a sluggish weekend.

I have found, however, that explaining the basis of this excitement to others is not easy. It comes down to the difficulty of explaining what it is that makes great writers truly great -- an elusive insight. Part of it is simple virtuosity; Cortazar possesses that which also distinguishes the writing of other greats such as Nabokov and Proust: that facility with language, the ability to find and to manipulate exactly the right words, to create a precise, vivid image, and to make music out of prose.

But it goes beyond virtuosity. If Cortazar wrote about ideas to which I was indifferent, the writing would not matter to me. But his stories inspire those flashes of recognition that make reading exciting; he creates those "aha" moments through his ability to present a feeling or situation that you recognize on some level, even if it's one that never previously made it out of your subconscious and which you might not have thought to remark upon, had not Cortazar dug it up for you.

From the general to the specific: This is a collection of short stories, most of which contain an element of the fantastic. Some of the flashes of recognition that I mention above are recognitions of mundane, daily feelings, but others are not. Cortazar seems to have ready access as well to our subconscious fears and to our dreams.

To take but a few cases in point: One story involves a brother and sister who share a large, old wooden house, once owned by their great grandparents. At one point in the story, they hear voices and commotion from another part of the house. They bolt the doors, shut off that section, and confine themselves to living in the front part of the house. It's all left quite mysterious: Cortazar never explains who "they" are, who have taken over part of the house. But someting about this story rings eerily true; it's that bizarre combination of vivid, mundane reality, and unexplained phenomena, and illogical reactions to those phenomena, that characterize dreams. Another example is a story in which a young girl goes to live with distant relatives in their country house for a summer. The house has a tiger roaming the rooms, but let's put that aside: what is remarkable about the story is Cortazar's ability to bring the scene to life, of an urbanite or suburbanite who is new to this comparatively relaxed environment. In one small, but typically rendered scene, the main character finds a bug crawling in an antiquated wash basin. She flicks at it, it curls into a ball, and she easily washes it down with running water. This is classic Cortazar; with a few well-chosen sentences, he puts you in that world: a world where the reader senses the sunlight through the house, the smell of pollen in the air, the renewed emphasis on the freshness of vegetables at the local market, and the ease with such inconveniences as older plumbing and intrusions by bugs are encountered. Comparison with other writers is a bit unfair, because Cortazar has a voice all of his own. But in case it's helpful to you, Cortazar's precise prose reminded me a bit of Nabokov, his sense of wonder and magic recalled Steven Millhauser, and his trafficking in paradoxes a bit like Borges. But he's not quite like any of them: his prose focuses less than Borges on logical contradictions, and is more weighted toward precisely rendering sensory images.

Several of the stories are outstanding. My favorites (in addition to the two mentioned above: "House Taken Over" and "Bestiary") included:

Axolotls -- in which the narrator identifies very closely with an exotic amphibian species on his trips to the zoo. A Yellow Flower -- an encounter with a sort of reincarnation gone awry. Continuity of Parks -- a very economical, very short story with an eerie, paradoxical twist. The Night Face Up -- a story in which reality and dreams are very difficult to distinguish

Cortazar is a master of the short story form. I would recommend him to anyone who likes the works of Borges, Millhauser, Nabokov, or Bruno Schulz.