The first translation of Julio Cortázar's genre-jumping
meta-comic/novella, featuring Cortázar himself, Susan Sontag, and
Octavio Paz in a race to prevent international bibliocide.
Octavio Paz: If you love art, do something, Fantomas!
Fantomas: I will, you can depend on it.
First published in Spanish in 1975 and previously untranslated,
Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires is Julio Cortázar's
genre-jumping mash-up of his participation in the Second Russell
Tribunal on human rights abuses in Latin America and his cameo
appearance in issue number 201 of the Mexican comic book series
Fantomas: The Elegant Menace. With his characteristic narrative
inventiveness, Cortázar offers a quixotic meta-comic/novella that
challenges not only the form of the novel but its political weight in
contemporary cultural life.
Needing something to read on the train from Brussels (where he had
attended the ineffectual tribunal meeting), our hero (Julio Cortázar)
picks up the latest issue of the Fantomas comic. He grows increasingly
absorbed by the comic book's tale of bibliocide (a sinister bibliophobic
plot to obliterate every book from the archives of humanity), especially
when he sees the character Fantomas embark upon a series of telephone
conversations with literary figures, starting with "The Great Argentine
Writer" himself, Julio Cortázar (and also including Octavio Paz and a
tough-talking Susan Sontag). Soon, Cortázar begins to erase the thin
line between real-life atrocities and fictional mayhem in an attempt to
bring attention to the human rights violations taking place with
impunity in the country from which he was exiled.
