Casa tomada y otros cuentos : 04/28/25

Casa tomada y otros cuentos by Julio Cortázar (1971) is a collection of surreal short stories. I mostly read it for the titular story as it was one my oldest had read in college (in translation) and I was curious to see how it played out in its original Spanish.

I should also note that I'm technically only half way through the collection of stories. I started reading through them a year ago but I kept finding other things to read instead and the book remained unfinished. Then this year Goodreads changed how it sorts its currently reading column and the oldest items remained at the top, rather than the updated ones floating to the top. As I found that distracting I decided to just declare the book "done" for now.

"Casa tomada" or "The Taken House" is a tale about an elderly pair of siblings who share the family home, a mansion that at one point had many servants and a large family. They are the last two. At some point in the story they hear voices in the house and believe someone has started using the closed off rooms. Rather than confront the person or investigate the noise, they just keep to their rooms. Slowly but surely they lose more and more of the house to this voice until they are outside on the street and are effectively locking the voice inside the now abandoned house.

I read the story in April 2024 but it has stuck with me. The first definition of the verb tomar is to take, and tomada would be taken. But colloquially tomar can also mean to drink and tomada can mean drunk (but not wasted drunk, just drunk up). That's essentially what's become of the house. All of the rooms of the house have been slurped up by some unseen (but heard) force.

Since reading the titular story I've watched the Canadian film Skinamarink (2023), twice. Although the siblings are children in that film, I feel like their fate is similar to the siblings in "Casa tomada" except for their lack of agency. The siblings in Cortázar's story are adults and can leave. The siblings in Skinamarink are very young children and are expected to stay put and ultimately have their ways out revoked by the house as the doors and windows disappear one by one.

Four stars

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