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“Continuity of Parks” by Julio Cortázar

“Continuity of Parks” is a short story also by Julio Cortázar that was first published in 1964. In this wild piece of metafiction, the frame story presents a man reading a novel upon returning home after completing some sort of urgent business. The novel he reads is the embedded story within this story. That story describes two lovers who meet in a cabin in the woods, with a plan to destroy “that other body.” Cortázar breaks convention and the story’s structure when one of the characters from the novel introduces himself into the frame story. Characters are killed, and the two realities become confused.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits shares with “House Taken Over” the genre of magical realism. Magical realism incorporates elements of realism alongside the fantastic, grotesque, or surreal. Its routes can be traced to Latin American writers of the 20th Century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel from the Latin American magical realism movement. The novel opens with perhaps one of the most famous lines ever written, in which Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembers while facing a firing squad a moment from his childhood in which his father took him to “discover ice.” The novel shares similar fantastical elements with “House Taken Over.”

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