Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (La Vuelta al Día en Ochenta Mundos) is a book by Julio Cortázar released and published in two separate volumes in 1967 (same year Hopscotch's translation wins the 1967 U.S. National Book Award). It pays homage to Julio's biggest literary influences while narrating new developments in the world of music during the 1960s, modern art (Dada and Surrealism) and some of the events in regard to the expanding involvement of the United States in other countries. The book also reveals for the first time one of Julio's pastimes in Paris: playing the trumpet.

Synopsis

Volume I

• Chapter 01: This is How it Starts (with a pre-introductory dedication to Pablo Neruda and Aragon)

• A touching memoir dedicated to Jules Verne and Lester Young without offending Phileas Fogg, about Charlie Parker, Stéphane Mallarmé, Passepartout, Aouda, Man Ray, Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp and Antonin Artaud.
• How to dance a shirtless girl (short story / mini poem)
• (Encore)

• Chapter 03: Julios in Action

• Jules Laforgue, Marcel Duchamp's drawing for the poem Encore a cet astre, Le Monde (thursday edition), Moulin a cafe, Dada exhibition in Paris (11.12.66), the first painting he saw by order of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Nu descendant un escalier) and a photograph of Julio playing the trumpet.

• Chapter 05: Theme for San Jorge
• Chapter 09: I fall... then emerge.
• Chapter 10: The smiler with the knife under the cloak
• Chapter 17: Clifford

Volume II

• Chapter 01: What Happens, Minerva?

• Happenings, Benjamin Patterson's Lawful Dance, Paik's Omnibus Music No. 1, Le Monde, Dick Higgins, Thomas Shmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Tetsumi Kudo.

• Chapter 03: Around the Piano of Thelonious Monk
• Chapter 05: On to Lezama Lima's Arrival
• Chapter 09: Mallarmé's Tombeau
• Chapter 13: The Nobel Art
• Chapter 14: The Most Profound Caress