A review by jimmylorunning
Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia by Julio Cortázar

4.0

Imagine you are a "Great Argentine Writer, Contemporary" and you've just branched outside of literature into the real world of effects by attending the Second Russell Tribunal in Brussells. The purpose of the tribunal is to investigate human rights violations in Latin America. You're a bit depressed after hearing all the testimony, and you're doubly depressed because the conclusions of the Tribunal are purely symbolic and will not likely lead to any real changes. On top of that, most people will never hear of the Tribunal or read its crushing indictments.

When you get home, you stumble across a popular comic strip starring the masked superhero Fantomas. You've read other comics in this series before, but you decide to open it anyway and to your surprise you find yourself in its pages! And many other cameos by writers as well: Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia, Octavio Paz, etc. Here you are, thinking what you did didn't matter, and yet you are in a popular comic strip. Well, what a better way to publicize the results of the Tribunal than to include it in a mad romp starring yourself or a version of yourself as seen through the Fantomas comic strip?

That's what Cortázar did. It's meta-meta-meta and fun-fun-fun and laugh out loud funny. There are parts that read a little like [b:If on a Winter's Night a Traveler|374233|If on a Winter's Night a Traveler|Italo Calvino|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355316130s/374233.jpg|1116802]. And other parts that feel process oriented like [a:César Aira|88379|César Aira|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1361001372p2/88379.jpg]. For a very short book (I read it in a day), it's pretty good at pulling together a bunch of disparate elements and still keeping things interesting, thought provoking, and unpredictable.