Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984) was an Argentine, nationalized French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe. He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through...
Weekend
Roland and Corinne are a bourgeois couple. Each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They drive out to Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary. The trip becomes a chaotically picaresque journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own Facel-Vega is destroyed in a collision, they wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, such as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Emily Brontë. When Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents' place, they discover that her father has died and her mother refuses to give them a share of the spoils. They kill her and hit the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of hippie revolutionaries (calling themselves the Seine and Oise Liberation Front) that support themselves through theft and cannibalism. Killed during an escape attempt, Roland is chopped up and cooked.
