Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
Published 1967 · 85,582 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction
How hard is Blow-Up and Other Stories to read?
Blow-Up and Other Stories scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Cortázar's vocabulary is literary but accessible, mixing colloquial porteño registers with more formal narrative language. The jazz terminology in 'The Pursuer' adds specialized vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Highly inventive syntax, particularly in the title story, which shifts between first and third person within sentences. Long, rhythmic sentences that mimic the movement of thought.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The stories ground abstract questions about perception and time in concrete situations. 'The Pursuer' is the most explicitly philosophical, meditating on temporal experience.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- The stories are measured in their pacing, allowing suspense and atmosphere to build. Density comes from layered meaning rather than compressed information.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Stories approach their subjects obliquely — the photograph reveals its meaning only upon enlargement, the jazz critic circles the truth of his subject without capturing it.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The photograph as unreliable witness, the jazz solo as alternative temporality, the bridge between realism and the fantastic. Symbols are embedded in narrative texture.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Cortázar is more emotionally engaged than Borges. The irony is structural — in the gap between what characters think they understand and what the narrative reveals.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Stories resist definitive interpretation. 'Blow-Up' ends without clarifying what actually happened. 'The Pursuer' ends with a death that resolves nothing about the questions it raised.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Individual stories experiment with point of view and temporal structure. The title story's shifting narration is a technical tour de force.
How Blow-Up and Other Stories is regarded
Blow-Up and Other Stories holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.