Julio Cortázar is one of the names most synonymous with both Argentine literature and the Latin American boom, and perhaps the most experimental. While he is best known for his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch), in which the reader can choose their own path through the chapters of the story, he also has a large oeuvre of short stories, many influenced by surrealism, which he no doubt encountered during his years in France, after leaving Argentina due to his dissatisfaction with the Perón government. 

Todos los fuegos el fuego, published in 1966, is a collection of 8 of his short stories, separate but with pervasive themes running through all of them. The title story exemplifies this the best, with a dual narrative of both a gladiator fight occurring in ancient Rome, and an argument between lovers in modern-day Paris, the two stories first alternating paragraphs, until the interchanging is so fast it is difficult to know what is happening on which timeline. And this is very much the point - the story’s title ‘Todos los fuegos el fuego’ (All Fires the Fire) points to an abstract sense of perpetuity through the many ages of man solidified by the concurrent events in the story.

Challenging the conceptions of time in this way is evident in other stories in this collection, notably ‘La autopista del sur’ (‘South highway’), which begins as an innocuous tale of a long traffic jam, which lasts longer and longer until a new microcosm of society is formed in between the cars stuck on the road, children are conceived and born, the elderly become sick and die. No timescale is given to the story but it still manages to show many facets of the human condition through the community that emerges out of the stationary cars. 

 ‘La isla a mediodia’ (‘The Island at Noon’) carries the surrealist influence into a story about a flight attendant, Marini, who fantasises about escaping to the island that his plane flies over every day at midday. After much teasing from his colleagues and passengers he decides to quit his job and join the population of the island, living the life he has fantasised about for so long. But the sound of his old plane flying over the island and a body washing up on the shore cause both Marini and the reader question their perception of reality…