The Lucky Ones. 62. Assembly Model

A group of lucky people wins tickets for a three-month sea cruise. And not only that – each can take three companions of their choice on the journey! Unheard-of luck! However, things unfold a bit differently than imagined – a... mysterious quarantine, forbidden rooms... Gradually, the real journey transforms into a mythological one, and the routine collisions of the lives of small people acquire truly eschatological features. The ordinary is permeated by the incomprehensible, – commented on this novel by Cortázar himself. And the shadow of the incomprehensible hovers over each of the lucky ones who found themselves on the ship. * * * 62. Assembly Model. A novel that Cortázar himself called his ugly but beloved child. A novel in which the great Argentine writer intensified and pushed to a logical limit the stylistic and aesthetic principles formed in The Winners. This work can be read literally – as a postmodern story about the City of Babylon and its diverse, multilingual inhabitants, or abstractly, as a whimsical philosophical parable about the influence of the Word on human consciousness, or one can delightfully seek out literary game motifs in this elegant piece.