Julio Cortázar

In its characters, themes, and preoccupations, Final Exam prefigures Cortázar's later fictions, including Blow-Up and his masterpiece, Hopscotch. Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), it is Cortázar's allegorical, bitter, and melancholy farewell to an Argentina from which he was about to be permanently self-exiled. (Cortázar moved to Paris the following year.) The setting of Final Exam...