Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortazar

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Julio Cortazar's pieces collected under the title "The Instruction Manual" are one of my favorite creative writing prompts. Like "How to Wind a Watch" above, they employ the structures of an instruction manual with mordant humor and the language of profound things. Sometimes they are extended jokes, like "How to Climb a Staircase"; sometimes, like "How to Kill Ants in Rome," they are absurdist vignettes. Students pick up quickly on how Cortazar uses the structure to ground his more fantastical images in the everyday, and they're able to make passing imitations without much study--which I think is a testament to how well the gimmick works. But until now, I'd never read the collection, Cronopios and Famas, of which "The Instruction Manual" is a part.

Cronopios has four parts; "The Instruction Manual" is first. It's followed by "Unusual Occupations," a series of scenes about a strange family who build a gallows in their yard, take over the post office and tar and feather the mail, keep a tiger. The third, "Unstable Stuff," is a hodge-podge of unrelated shorts, which showcase Cortazar at his most experimental. Some work, and others are--rarely--a little too one-note.

The final section is the title section, "Cronopios and Famas," about the title--people? Figures? Animals? Cortazar never stops to define the neologisms; we learn little about what they refer to except that cronopios tend to be wet, and green. By their interactions we begin to learn their characters: the famas are outgoing and rigid, the cronopios hapless but sensitive. They are joined by a third group, the cruel esperanzas, doing things like getting mad at famas for dancing in one way rather than another. What emerges from these pieces is a sense of a caste system, in which people or things are slotted into narrow social roles by their disposition; there are echoes, perhaps, of the racial classifications you see in fantasy novels--proud elves, grumpy dwarves, wise wizards.

One might build a considerable interpretive apparatus on the backs of these short tales of cronopios and famas--something about social conditioning, or human psychology, or something like that. But to do that would risk missing how fun these stories are, how playfully game-like an uninhibited. It might turn you into a fama--or worse, an esperanza.