I loved the piece, "A Continuity of Parks" by Julio Cortázar (1967) and translated by Paul Blackburn (found on pp. 187-188 in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Shorter Seventh Edition, by R. Bausch and R.V. Cassill). When I read it for the first time, I was hooked by the author's description of what it feels like to really get absorbed in a book. I can connect to the main character when he "[disengages] himself line by line from the things around him" and "[lets] himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement." I get like that with books I really like, and it happens that I did so while reading this piece, too. All of a sudden, the characters who I thought were in the book being read appeared in back of the main character's "armchair covered in green velvet" (which was mentioned earlier on), seemingly ready to harm him. WHAT? I thought. I finished the piece and was stunned; where had that transition from book to real life happened? I had done what the main character had done- get separated from reality just enough to stop paying attention to details. I went back and found I'd underlined, "one felt it had been decided from eternity," which now seems like foreshadowing of the plot twist. Farther back, I found the sentence where the main character went completely into the book he was reading, so to say ("he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin"). From then on, the main character transforms to a part of the book he had been reading.
Similarly to the art I love that tricks our eyes and minds with illusions, "A Continuity of Parks" had the same affect for me with it's use of relatable, realistic descriptions yet ingenious and unpredictable overall story structure.
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