All Fires the Fire

If Hopscotch introduced Cortázar as a structural magician with grand ambitions, All Fires the Fire is what makes readers fall in love with him at first sight. Eight stories, eight ways of playing with narrative: a gridlocked highway can become a miniature social history, a travel poster can pull a man out of reality, and a gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome can be cross-cut with a love affair in Paris into a single blaze. "Fascinating" is the first word critics reach for when speaking of Cortázar, and this book is the most direct proof of that fascination. It does not please you through spectacle and twists—though there are plenty of twists—but through an entire narrative language that makes you realize mid-sentence, suddenly, that the ground beneath you is already swaying. Fan Ye's translation is clean and rhythmic, showing particular skill in handling those constantly roving pronouns and shifts in perspective, something very difficult to achieve in Chinese. The afterword at the end explains the background of each story and the translator's approach, and is especially friendly to first-time readers of Cortázar. A slim volume of some two hundred pages, yet it rewards repeated rereading, revealing new mechanisms each time.