Exam. Divertissement

This collection includes two early works by Cortázar, "Examination" and "Divertissement", written when he was still searching for his literary style. Yet even in them one can already sense the mood he himself called "Buenos Aires melancholy", and that elusive, shifting music of words and sense of intellectual play with the reader that would later become a characteristic feature of his inimitable prose. "And the sleeping city seems from the balconyA Midnight meadow, illuminatedBy the millionth color of white daisies".The city is dying, gripped by the strange and terrifying madness of nature unleashed and the bloody chaos of social cataclysms. And in this almost Kafkaesque nightmare two young couples walk the night streets on the eve of an important examination and engage in an endless intellectual debate. A misty city, misty prospects, the overflowing energy of their passionate hearts and the bitterness of a love shared yet divided. Today they are together, but by the end of the coming day life will forever part them in different directions.* * *The attempt to decipher the meaning of an unfinished painting leads the group of young people into a shifting world of symbols and metaphors, in which people, things, and even the meanings of familiar words are not what they seem. Into a world of play, the rules of which are incomprehensible to us, and the essence unclear—yet we vaguely guess that they do indeed exist...