Charles de gaulle biography cortazar

Julio Cortázar
1959

Introduction

In 1959, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar published a short story entitled "El Perseguidor" ("The Pursuer") that vividly brought to life the bebop scene of 1950s Paris. Taking the final months in the life of the prodigious jazz musician Johnny Carter as its subject, the story is in many ways an exploration of the career and personal life of the famous alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the most influential musician of the style of jazz music known as bebop. "The Pursuer" offers a glimpse into Johnny's personal life, from his severe drug addiction and psychological instability to his profound philosophical insights, and it follows the key moments of Johnny's relationship with his biographer and critic Bruno, the narrator of the story.

With its daring narrative structure, which uses shifting verb tenses as a way of reinforcing its challenging conception of time and philosophy, Cortázar's short story is clearly the work of a talented and ambitious writer. By the time he published his early short stories, such as "The Pursuer" in Paris, Cortázar had begun to establish himself among an international community of innovative writers. His depiction of the tensions between the critic and the artist, the theme of pursuit in art and life, and newly emerging philosophies of time and space, have earned "The Pursuer" a place among the classic texts of post-World-War-II literature. The story was originally published in the collection Las Armas Secretas (The Secret Weapons), but Paul Blackburn's translation from the Spanish became available in End of the Game and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1963.

Author Biography

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 and raised by his mother in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Throughout his youth he developed a passion for clas

The march began in near silence. Only the repetitive sound of a saxophone rang out as the procession moved through central Paris, making its way from the Pantheon, where France buries its great, to the Place de la Concorde, the biggest public square in the French capital. One by one, 100 10-foot-high banners hoisted on tall bamboo poles appeared, carried by some 300 activists.

Like a veritable flotilla of sails, they fluttered in the winter wind. One was in both French and Spanish: “Ou sont-ils? Donde estan?” (“Where are they?”) Another was wordless — just a canvas painting of two eyes, wide open as if in shock. Each banner stood for an artist who had been “disappeared,” presumably killed, by a military regime half a world away — in Argentina.

The protest on Nov. 14, 1981, organized by the International Association for the Defense of Artist Victims of Repression in the World (AIDA), drew between 5,000 and 7,000 people, including French-Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar, First Secretary of the French Socialist Party Lionel Jospin and Greek-French film director Costa-Gavras.

The march was a theatrical way to capture the international spotlight: For a few hours, the plight of Argentina’s disappeared took center stage.

Since Jorge Videla’s military coup in 1976, Argentina had been waging war against dissidents, artists and intellectuals. Though the dictatorial regime had tried to hide its reign of terror, information that was surreptitiously filtered out of Argentina had led to a burgeoning global awareness of the ever-rising number of the disappeared — which by the end, human rights organizations today estimate, was as high as 30,000 people.

In 1981, the return of democracy in Argentina was still two years away. But international resistance was building — and the nerve center of this growing movement was not Buenos Aires or even Madrid: It was Paris. French leftists (including French President Francois Mit

Regis Debray has led the fullest of lives, embroiled in ideology, controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained in the use of assault weapons with Fidel Castro; he trod the thankless Bolivian forests with Che Guevara and served nearly four years in jail for his trouble. In Chile he was taken up by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. Ten years later he became an adviser at the Elysée to François Mitterrand, his country’s only postwar socialist president. He is a revolutionary Third Worldist turned revisionist, turned Gaullist – his Gaullism a lament for the absence of credible leaders anywhere on the European horizon. He is, above all, a sceptic sorting through the ruins of his former world-historical ambitions, though from time to time the eyes of an unreconstructed optimist gleam behind the mask of the disabused older man.

Debray was born in 1940. He has been many things but not, until the 1990s, a writer of distinction. ‘I wanted to earn a living by the pen,’ he wrote in the first volume of his three-volume memoir. ‘I didn’t know that writing is a job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for sure, deeply ‘literary’ in the best sense, but also a work of strategic depth that draws us fully into the world of power and politics, and the characters of powerful men.

It is less a sequel to the first volume of the memoir than a return to the same ground. The first, Les Masques, appeared in 1987, Praised Be Our Lords nearly ten years later in the original edition: time eno