Guillermo Martínez's anecdote, which prefaces this book, epitomises the current critical reception of Julio Cortázar, at least insofar as Argentina is concerned. As Roberto Ferro put it, it seems that the days of Cortázar as a ‘gran escritor’ ended with the publication of Libro de Manuel, and with the labelling of Cortázar as a ‘political writer’. The contradictions manifested within Cortázar's construction of his image are to an extent perpetuated in an episode at a book fair in Buenos Aires in 2009. There, the very same writers who were paying tribute to Cortázar in the round-table discussion were simultaneously declaring that his days as a ‘good’ or respected writer were not only numbered, but were actually over. Meanwhile, Papeles inesperados, a volume containing Cortázar's previously unknown manuscripts, was one of the best-sellers at the fair.

In the hope of modifying some of the prevailing preconceptions about Cortázar, this study has attempted to show that he did not ‘become’ a political writer as a result of his first trip to Cuba, and that the critical claim that divides Cortázar's fictional writings into the apolitical and the political is altogether misleading. Through tracing the evolution of the representation of political elements in his writings, from El examen to Libro de Manuel, it has been shown that politics had always been a point of reference in Cortázar's fiction.