In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life’s mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by the mysterious Abel.

Darkly funny and steeped in ambiguity, Final Exam is Julio Cortázar’s haunting allegory of a world on the brink—his melancholic, defiant farewell to an Argentina he would soon leave behind forever.

Julio Cortazar lived in Buenos Aires for the first thirty years of his life, and after that in Paris. His stories, written under the dual influence of the English masters of the uncanny and of French surrealism, are extraordinary inventions, just this side of nightmare. In later life Cortazar became a passionate advocate for human rights and a persistent critic of the military dictatorships in Latin America. He died in 1984.