The Winners. 62: A Model Kit

A group of lottery winners receives tickets for a three-month ocean cruise. What is more, each can bring along three companions of their choosing—an extraordinary stroke of luck! Yet things do not unfold quite as imagined: a mysterious quarantine, forbidden rooms. Gradually, the real journey transforms into a mythological quest, and the routine conflicts of “ordinary people” take on truly eschatological dimensions. “The ordinary is permeated by the unfathomable,” Cortázar remarked about this novel, and a shadow of the incomprehensible hangs over every passenger aboard the ship. “62: A Model Kit” is the novel Cortázar himself referred to as his “ugly but favorite child”—a work in which the great Argentine writer pushed the stylistic and aesthetic principles pioneered in “Hopscotch” to their ultimate logical limit.