"I wrote "Examination" in the mid-40s in Buenos Aires, where the imagination did not have to add much to historical reality to get what the reader learns about from the book.

B In those days, it was impossible to publish the book, and only a few of my friends read it. Subsequently, being far from those places, I learned that my friends saw in some episodes of the book a harbinger of the events that marked our 1952 and 1953 years. what I guessed in this obituary lottery of ours. It was too easy: the Argentine future flows so persistently from the present that predicting future events does not require special talents from the predictor.

I am publishing this old story because I , no matter what, I like his free language, the plot without preaching, his special, Bueno Aires, sadness, and also because the nightmare with which he was born is still alive and wandering the streets of the city."

Julio Cortazar