Many of the short stories of Julio Cortázar present situations that appear to be absurd or fantastic…. These stories of the bestial and the demonic may be interpreted on two different levels. One is the purely fantastic or supernatural, in which time is cyclical and the self has avatar identities. Metempsychoses occur not only between two human souls but between human and animal spirits. Demonic forces are conjured up, sometimes by a weird pagan ritual and at others by a type of extrasensory process or mental telepathy. Yet another, equally convincing tack of interpretation, and one that attests to the complexity of the short fiction of Cortázar, is to view him as a realist author and to interpret the bizarre experiences that plague the lives of his characters as due to the operation of their own disturbed consciousnesses. Their minds are invaded by subconscious impulses which...