Julio Cortázar Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard A. Young

Critical Essay by Richard A. Young

SOURCE: Young, Richard A. “Prefabrication in Julio Cortázar's ‘Lugar Llamado Kindberg’.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4 (fall 1991): 521-34.

In the following essay, Young provides a stylistic analysis of “A Place Named Kindberg.”

“Lugar llamado Kindberg” (“A Place Named Kindberg”), a short story by Julio Cortázar, first published in 1974 in a volume titled Octaedro, has a narrative economy that is one of the author's trademarks and consists of very few elements: two characters, a restricted space, and a simple chain of events that unfolds in a short period of time. One rainy day, while driving through Central Europe, a traveling salesman of prefabricated materials, an Argentine named Marcelo, gives a ride to a young female hitchhiker named Lina. They arrive after nightfall at a hotel in a place called Kindberg, a town to the southwest of Vienna. They share a meal and, as Marcelo anticipated, spend the...
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