Speaking of the absurdity of dialogue:

"All this talk is absolutely useless," [Claudia] said. "When I began to read novels, and I began very young, I always had the feeling that the dialogue was usually ridiculous. For the simple reason that the slightest incident would have put an end to these conversations or cut them short. For instance, what if I had been in my cabin, or you had decided to go on deck instead of coming here to have a beer? Why place any importance on an exchange of words provoked by the most absurd circumstances?"

"The worst of it," said Medrano, "is that it can be applied to every act in life, including love, which, until now, has seemed the most serious and fatal of our activities. To accept your point of view means that all of our existence becomes trivial, to toss it to the dogs of pure absurdity."

"Why not?" said Claudia. "Persio would say that what we call absurd is only our ignorance."

- from The Winners by Julio Cortázar

I think I like this book a lot more than I liked The Savage Detectives. And I think it just crystallized for me why that is, and I think it's because of the dialogue. Though Detectives is all first person narrative, it never feels like anybody is connecting with anybody else through dialogue, like speech is just a blunt act performed upon the reader, not something that exists in the world as described by the stories the book tells. Which is fine. I'm not speaking critically of it. But to pop out of that book and into The Winners, which--to borrow from the book's nautical theme--is very much a sea of dialogue, of people talking (albeit more eloquently and cleanly that anybody in real life does) to each other, or at least with and near each other, is to dive into dialogue with a fresh eye and a thirsty ear for the stuff. I find myself pausing to read passages aloud to myself to enhance the meaning of it. Hardly poetry, but perhaps poetic, in its way. Which of course raises questions of the unique musics of translations, etc etc etc., which I shall not delve into here.

I also won't go into the game imagery that surfaces now and then during the book. There's easily a paper to write about that, though, that's for certain.