Madsen Hardy has a Ph.D. in English and is a freelance writer. In the following essay, she considers Cortazar's use of foreign-language words as a way of understanding how his experience as an expatriate may have shaped the story's style and its themes.

I once took a class in Latin American fiction in which my professor described Cortazar's book as not the sort with which one wants to curl up in bed. There is something cold and distant about Cortazar's style. Plus, one needs to be quite alert to keep up with him "Axolotl" is a story that makes its readers think hard, and such hard thinking is also the story's major theme. "Axolotl" is, after all, a story about immobility, thus the protagonist's action entails almost nothing but the laborious processes of his/its/their consciousness. It is this set of qualities, I believe, that...