62 - A Model Kit

Welcome to 62: A Model Kit (1994) by Julio Cortázar (Marion Boyars), ISBN 9780714525310 — a novel that looks you in the eye and says, very calmly: Here are the pieces. Build the story yourself. And then watches, politely, as you realise the pieces may be moving.

If you’re expecting a conventional plot with a beginning, middle, and end that line up like obedient dominoes, Cortázar has bad news (and it’s delightful). This is fiction as pattern, echo, collage — a book where meaning isn’t delivered, it’s assembled. The title is not joking: it’s a model kit. You get characters, scenes, cities, gestures, fragments of conversation, odd coincidences, recurring images, and a strong sense that reality is a little looser than you were promised. The pleasure is in the connections — and in the fact that the connections are never fully pinned down.

Cortázar’s world is cosmopolitan and slightly uncanny: people drift between Paris, London, Vienna (and the mental spaces in between), falling into conversations that feel like puzzles, relationships that feel like déjà vu, and moments that seem to carry secret instructions. There’s humour, elegance, and that peculiar Cortázar quality where the everyday can suddenly tilt into the surreal without any dramatic special effects — just a shift in perception and a sentence that lands a fraction too perfectly.

The irony here is that it can feel both playful and deeply serious. You’ll catch yourself smiling at the cleverness, then get snagged by something unsettling — a sense of unseen design, a shadow of violence, the idea that people’s lives might be linked by forces they can’t name. The book doesn’t shout its themes. It lets them accumulate like music: repetition, variation, tension, release. Reading it is less like being told a story and more like walking through a set of rooms where the wallpaper repeats in different colours and you start to suspect the house is thinking.

Marion Boyars is a perfect fit as a publisher: this is literary, slightly daring, the sort of book you buy because you enjoy being intellectually nudged off balance. It’s the kind of novel that makes you feel sophisticated just by owning it — and then makes you work for that sophistication by refusing to behave.

Condition: Very Good, meaning this copy has been treated with the sort of respect people give to books that might bite. It’s been read, but carefully; carried, but not battered. Clean enough to feel “almost new,” and solid enough to handle rereading — which is important, because this is absolutely the kind of book that changes slightly when you come back to it. (Or you do. Same difference.)

Perfect for:

• fans of experimental and modernist fiction,

• Cortázar devotees and curious newcomers who enjoy puzzles,

• readers who like their novels to behave like art objects,

• and anyone who has ever wished a book would stop holding their hand and instead hand them a screwdriver.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, naturally — because where else would a very good copy of an elegant, brain-bending Cortázar “model kit” end up, if not waiting for the next reader to open it, start assembling meaning, and realise they’ve built something strange, beautiful, and slightly alive.

Keep browsing: See more Fiction books Other books by Julio Cortazar