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    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over"
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over"
    Ebook32 pages33 minutes

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535825009
    A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over"

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      A Study Guide for Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over" - Gale

      10

      House Taken Over

      Julio Cortázar

      1946

      Introduction

      House Taken Over, by Julio Cortázar, is a brief short story that portrays a spinster sister and her bachelor brother as they live a quiet existence in their sprawling ancestral home. Much of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of the house and of the siblings' efforts to maintain it. When not cleaning the house, the sister, Irene, spends her time knitting. Irene's unnamed brother, who is also the story's narrator, spends his free time reading French literature. The story and its characters seem rather static until a mysterious presence begins to take over the house. Brother and sister are first relegated to their own wing, and then they are fully evicted. This presence is never explained, but the suspense and sense of mystery that pervade the remainder of the story are undeniable. The introduction of this understated otherworldly element places the story squarely in the Latin American tradition of magical realism. This tradition is particularly characterized by subtle supernatural elements incorporated into an otherwise ordinary scenario.

      House Taken Over was Cortázar's first published short story. It appeared as Casa tomada in 1946 in the periodical Los Anales de Buenos Aires. Jorge Luis Borges, one of the leading literary figures in magical realism, was the editor of the periodical at the time. House Taken Over next appeared in the 1951 collection Bestiario. It was first published in English in the 1967 End of the Game and Other Stories. This same collection was published as Blow-Up and Other Stories the following year; a 1985 reprint of this title was still in print as of 2009.

      Author Biography

      Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, on August 26, 1914. His sister, Ofelia, was born there the following year. Their parents, Maria Scott and Julio Cortázar, were Argentine citizens living abroad, and the family returned to Argentina around 1918. From then on, Cortázar grew up in Banfield, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father abandoned the family not long thereafter.

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