Julio Cortazar on the nature of remakes

Julio Cortazar on Roberto Arlt

Everyone is familiar with those hopeful exhumations we finally perform on certain books, movies, or music, and the almost always disappointing results; sometimes the fault lies with the work itself, sometimes with those who try to repeat what is unrepeatable, to revive for a moment one’s youth which closed its eyes and sunk its teeth into the fruit of time. Every once in a while, however, we emerge from a movie, a chapter, or a concert feeling the plenitude of a return encounter that does not entail loss, of an almost unspeakable eradication of age that carries us back to our first bedazzlements — all the more astonishing now that they are no longer shored up by innocence or ignorance.

-Julio Cortazar, from “Roberto Arlt: Notes on a Rereading”, introduction to Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen (New York Review Books, 2015)

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Jeff Alford

Jeff Alford is a critic and book collector based in Denver, CO. He is a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Rain Taxi Review of Books and the New Orleans Review and author of the now-retired rare books and small press blog www.theoxenofthesun.com.

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