Paula looked at him thoughtfully, sighed, and then they both jumped up at the same time and raced for the bath. Paul won and Raul went back to bed and took out a cigarette. A good beating...There were several people who would use a good beating. A beating with flowers, with wet towels, with a slow perfumed scratch...A beating that would last for hours, interrupted by reconciliations and caresses, the perfect vocabulary of hands, capable of abolishing and justifying the blows only so they could begin again between moans and final forgetfulness, like a leopard skin or a dialogue between statues.

- from The Winners by Julio Cortázar

The Winners is weirder than I initially thought it was going to be.

Not to second-guess myself, but I wonder how much real "connection" happens between characters in the book, through dialogue or otherwise. The game imagery that surfaces now and then is highly appropriate. The book is one of contrasts, of conflicts. Man versus woman, one versus another. Ship versus sea. Decision versus indecision. Love and fear. Earth versus sky. The known versus the unknown, safety versus danger. Making sense versus not making sense--the Persio interludes are not lightly read and feel increasingly incoherent, at least on an initial read.

The book, in fact, has not "renounced effects" or "formal beauty" as Paula suggests the new literature must, going forward: "'This new style could only come from a new vision of the world. But if one day it's accomplished, how stupid these novels we admire today are going to seem, these novels full of infamous tricks, chapters and subchapters, with well-calculated entrances and exits...'" Though, to be fair, while the book does feel calculated, in it's way, it's got the feel of a calculated sort of chaos. And the more of it I try to hold in my head at any one time the more it begins to splash around and resonate like a gong tumbling down a hill falling toward an oven overbaking a metaphor.

Grk. I really ought not to be allowed to think out loud.