Cortazar- The Pursuer

This narrative style immediately reminded me of Joyce and also, for some reason, of Dostoyevsky(specifically Notes From the Underground- maybe the narrative style and the self-deprecation)... Cortazar changes tenses abruptly in the very first paragraph and then continues to swing between past and present throughout the narrative.

One thing that struck me as different from our other readings is that you would never have to know that the author is Latin American. Everything about the pursuer is so European, and I think, before Latin American even American or just cosmopolitan with the jazz and blues references. In most of the other novels, there was this relationship to nature and the land that is so typical of the earlier works we read and is completely lacking here. The Pursuer is more in line with the Sur writers work, I think. Johnny's ideas about time are very sort of sloppy Borgesian. Or at least, this obsession with time and space and the metaphysical is something we've seen before in Borges, Bombal, Bioy.

The Pursuer was so dense that is seemed to wind around and back into itself. It's structure is basically a meditation interspliced with dialogue. It's as if we are just listening to Bruno think, and yet there are sections where he seems to be very aware that he has an audience.

Bruno, swings back and forth between loving Johnny and despising him and in the end I think I hated them both. However, I think Cortazar does an incredible job of depicting the relationship between the two of them without using any sort of 'outside' narrator. And I almost forgot that Bruno was not Cortazar himself and that Johnny Carter was just a character( I did find an American Jazz musician- a saxophone player- named John Carter born in 1929... but this is probably just a coincidence). I think this novel offers a really interesting look at jazz in the 50s and it's great that it starts in Paris and ends with almost everyone in new york. And I love the Dylan Thomas reference at the beginning and then at the very end as Johnny's last words- "O make me a mask."

I think this was a beautiful piece even though it was, at times, kind of ridiculous and obscure.

Also, I wonder if the dedication Ch. P, is Charlie Parker?