The Continuity of Parks by Julio Cortázar

The Sunken Place.

The act of reading is such a curious and almost magical experience. Arguably, it's the closest we, as humans, will come to actual time travel. Getting lost in a good book can feel like an out-of-body experience, where time slows down or even disappears altogether. Reality momentarily dissolves and suddenly you’re elsewhere: in another era, another world, even inside someone else’s mind. You’re not just observing events; you’re inhabiting them. You're thinking the author's thoughts, feeling their characters’ emotions, and watching entire scenes unfold through words on a page. It’s kind of trippy experience when you really think about it.

Julio Cortázar’s The Continuity of Parks captures this strange, immersive magic in just two short paragraphs. It’s a clever piece of metafiction that turns the act of reading itself into the actual story. The boundary between reader and fiction blurs until it disappears entirely, pulling the rug out from under you in the best way. Cortázar playfully deconstructs the art of fiction, showing how effortlessly a narrative can pull us in, to the point where the fictional and the real become indistinguishable.

What makes the story so effective isn't just the twist, but how subtly it builds towards that moment of fusion between the protagonist reading in his comfy velevet chair and the world he’s reading about in the novel. Reading allows him to experience the powerful sense of "escapism" literally and figuratively, reshaping reality through fiction. 

You can read this story HERE.