خوليو كورتازار
طفولة صعبة صنعت سحرية ملفته

Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and María Herminia Descotte, moved from Argentina in 1913 to Brussels, Belgium, where Cortázar was born on August 26, 1914. At the time of his birth Belgium was occupied by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Zürich where María Herminia's parents, Victoria Gabel and Louis Descotte (a French National) were waiting in neutral territory. The family group spent the next two years in Switzerland, first in Zurich, then in Geneva, before moving for a short period to Barcelona. The Cortázars settled in Buenos Aires by the end of 1919.[3]

Cortázar's parents divorced a few years after their return to Argentina.[2] Cortázar spent most of his childhood in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, with his mother and younger sister.

The home in Banfield, with its back yard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Despite this, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá on December 4, 1963 he described this period of his life as

He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading.

His mother selected what he read[citation needed], introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote:

"I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elves, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."