Final Exam

Final ExamCondition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780811217521 Year: 2010 Publisher: W W Norton & Company Pages: 256 Description: One of Julio Cortzar's great early novels. 'Anyone who doesn't read Cortzar is doomed.'? Pablo Neruda In its characters, themes, and preoccupations, Final Exam prefigures Cortzar's later fictions, including Blow Up and his masterpiece, Hopscotch. Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Pern's government), it is Cortzar's allegorical, bitter,

Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9780811217521
Year: 2010
Publisher: W W Norton & Company
Pages: 256


Description:


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

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.