Cortazar, absurdist-existentialist-surrealist and above all
experimentalist (he's been called all these things over and over),
has taken the conceit of this book ("where recurrences and
displacements try to be free of all causal fixedness, but
especially on the level of meaning") from a chapter in his
best-known 1966 novel Hopscotch. But it is by no means surprising
or circumstantial that in the earliest most difficult pages here he
refers to Michel Butor and with a certain irritation one remembers
all those longueurs of that endless train ride in Butor's Change of
Heart as once again there are shifting images and associations and
dreams and reprises. Perhaps it is no longer as necessary to put up
with them - they are after all the artificial devices of the now
aging nouveau roman which has receded in the distance with all
those telephone poles. Moving from London/Paris/Vienna, this
alternates between the members of a small group of emigre-artist
intellectuals: Nicole who paints and Marrast who sculpts and thinks
of affiliating himself with some "anonymous neurotics"; a pair of
Argentinians who chatter about some swallows in the Underground and
here "the emission of an incomprehensible language" is truly so
(pettifor and mulgh and cronk); but particularly Juan, sad at the
loss of Helene, a dominantly seductive presence whom he tries to
reach through another young woman. Ultimately, if only on the
superficial level with which Cortazar is least concerned, it all
falls into place. But it demands attention (isolating and
separating and deciphering) while often encouraging the opposite as
the eye elides all these states of consciousness and correlations.
Mr. Cortazar tells you at the start that the reader's option "his
personal montage of the elements in the tale, will in each case be
the book he has chosen to read" - a free finesse for any reviewer
impatient with the imaginative and technical bravura of the
performance. (Kirkus Reviews)
As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to
one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be
where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it
might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos
Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an
assist from Bela Lugosi " It is the meeting place for a wild
assortment of bohemians in a novel described by The New York Times
as "Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and
fascinatingly mysterious." Library Journal has said 62: A Model Kit
is "a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary
writers of our time."
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