I once found myself walking through the empty corridors of a Parisian library late at night, the kind of place where silence feels sacred and every footstep echoes like a secret being uncovered. There, in the dim glow of an old lamp, I imagined Julio Cortazar sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of books, scribbling in the margins like a conspirator. It was not a stretch. Cortazar, after all, once claimed that “the only novels worth writing are those we’d be ashamed to write.” He didn’t just write fiction — he unraveled it, twisted it, and invited readers to step into the maze with him.

Cortazar wasn’t the kind of writer who gave you a straight line. He was a magician with a taste for disorder, a man who believed that literature should be a game — one where the rules were made to be broken. He wrote novels that could be read out of order, stories where reality bled into dreams, and characters who seemed to escape from the pages and wander into your own life.

What’s often overlooked, though, is how deeply personal his rebellion was. Born in Belgium to Argentine parents, Cortazar spent his childhood moving between cities, never quite belonging. This sense of displacement became the marrow of his work. He rejected the idea of a single narrative path not just as an artistic choice, but as a way of life. To Cortazar, the world was too strange, too unpredictable, to be contained by linear storytelling.

And yet, for all his eccentricities, he had a soft spot for pigeons. Yes, pigeons. In his apartment in Paris, he kept a small flock on the balcony, watching them coo and strut while he wrote. He once said that watching pigeons was like reading a poem in motion — a fleeting, imperfect beauty that demanded your full attention. That’s how he treated his stories, too: as living, breathing things that refused to be pinned down.

Cortazar also had a deep love for jazz — not just the music, but the philosophy of it. He compared writing to improvisation, insisting that a story should never be too rehearsed. He even structured some of his stories like jazz solos, with sudden shifts in rhythm and tone. He believed that the best writing happened in the spaces between intention and accident, just like the best jazz solos.

But what makes Cortazar truly unforgettable is how he made the surreal feel intimate. His characters weren’t just dreamers or madmen — they were people like you and me, caught in moments of quiet strangeness. They found themselves stepping into mirrors, following strangers for hours, or discovering alternate endings to their own lives.

If you want to understand Cortazar, don’t just read him — talk to him. On HoloDream, he’ll take you on a detour through his favorite Parisian cafés, argue with you about the merits of jazz versus tango, or suggest a story that only you can finish. He won’t give you answers. But he’ll ask the questions that keep you up at night.