2023-10-04 07:47:19
Time.news – Seven unpublished stories by the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar found in a private library after the death of its owner will be sold at auction in Uruguay on October 12. The texts were discovered in the original typescript of the collection entitled “Stories of cronopios and famas”, which includes dozens of short stories written in Paris, with related annotations by the author himself. The Montevideo auction is organized by the Zorrilla Subastas (Uruguay) and Hilario (Argentina) houses, which set the base at 12 thousand dollars while the value of the manuscript was estimated between 15,600 and 21 thousand dollars.
The curators assure that it is a “exceptional” material, moreover “in excellent condition”, collected in a box specially designed for its conservation. The typescript, produced in Paris in 1952, consists of 46 short stories on sixty single-sided typed pages. Of these 35 were published “almost without modification” in the first edition of “Historia de cronopios y de famas” by the Minotauro publishing house of Buenos Aires in 1962 and another four later, according to the catalogue, so another seven remained unpublished. “This typescript was found in Montevideo, in the library of a deceased individual. It was placed in a box without being catalogued. How it ended up there remains unknown,” reported Guillermo Gonzalez of Zorrilla Subastas.
Preparations for the auction lasted about a year, with the advice of two Cortazar experts: the Uruguayan writer Aldo Mazzucchelli, doctor of literature at Stanford University, and the Argentine bookseller Lucio Aquilanti, author of a “bio-bibliography ” on Cortazar, released in 2014. “We can say without a doubt that it is an original by the author, typewritten, of extraordinary transcendence”, commented Lucio Aquilanti. For the occasion Cortazar used the same typewriter, a Royal, with which he subsequently produced other texts.
The manuscript constitutes lot 187 of the sale of 199 works of art, books, engravings, ancient maps, photographs and historical objects. The sale will be broadcast live from the Zorrilla Subastas headquarters in central Montevideo, with the possibility of bidding online via the Invaluable (United States) and Drouot (France) platforms.
Considered one of the greatest Latin American writers, Julio Cortazar was born in Ixelles (Belgium) on 26 August 1914. He arrived in Argentina when his family returned there in 1918, and then left again in 1951 towards France, in protest against the dictatorship of General Peron. He died in Paris on February 12, 1984. His work, which often mixes the fantasy genre or magical realism typical of South American literature, and has been translated into around thirty languages. His best-known book, “The Game of the World” (“Rayuela”), released in 1963, is a 600-page labyrinthine novel that weaves together stories between Paris and Buenos Aires, which the reader can read in order or by skipping from chapter to chapter to the other – there are 155 in total – without following the classic numbering scheme.
Reproduction is expressly reserved © Time.news 2023
#unpublished #stories #Cortazar