"Continuidad de los parques" ("The Continuity of Parks") is a short story in Spanish by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984).
He sits in a high-backed, green velvet armchair, savoring the "almost perverse pleasure" of reading the story while enjoying his cigarettes and the view of the park from his study window.
[1][2] At that moment, the two stories join, as the (real) reader realizes that the man in the chair is the victim of the two lovers in the novel he is reading.
"The Continuity of Parks" is, according to Lauro Zavala, "simultaneously the fiction and metafiction most studied in the history of literature".
The frame story presents a man reading a novel on his return to his home estate after completing some "urgent business" in town.
The novel that he is reading, the embedded story, describes two lovers who meet in a cabin in the woods, with a plan to destroy "that other body".
The story begins by introducing a landowner who escapes from his business responsibilities by taking refuge in his study to read a novel.
The lack of closure of the story for not having read the novel makes the end disappear, evidencing the guilt of the real reader, who has become victimized or an accomplice in the death of the character while watching the crime.