At the entrance one enters a vestibule leading to the atrium, which consists of a living room, two bedrooms on either sides and, separated by a corridor, the kitchen and a bathroom.
The house, a very large mansion the pair inherited from their grandparents, is a large building divided in two living segments.
The brother reads books, with a preference for French literature. The sister spends the day knitting clothing, leaving the unused garments to become moth food once stored in various parts of the house. Aging in their quiet domestic existence, the pair has never got married: since they subsist from financial income from their farms, they don’t need to work for a living and their only household activities -dusting and cleaning the house- are concluded at eleven. The House is the one where the narrator himself (the brother) and his sister Irene live. In this way these illustrations represent a literary and graphic antecedent of that family of works where “theatrical staging” is itself part of the narration, (and of which we have already written about here: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) These drawings are particularly interesting in that they are not limited to the mere translation of the narrated space into one of the possible floor-plans of the house, but they really use the floor-plan as the scenario of the narration, turning it into one of the characters of the story. The illustrations that follow are taken from “ Casa Tomada, Julio Cortazar, en traduccion al diseno de Juan Fresan, Ediciones minotauro, Buenos Aires, 1969″ (Thanks to Flickr user Iliazd) Thanks to writer China Miéville (author of very good “The City & the City”) and to his article about the “ 50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read” I just discovered “House Taken Over”, a short story written in 1944 by Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar (better known for “ La Rayuela” and “ Historias de Cronopios y de Famas“) and first published in “ Los anales de Buenos Aires“, a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges.
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