Carol Dunlop

Carol Dunlop
Born	(1946-04-02)April 2, 1946 Quincy, Massachusetts
Died	November 2, 1982(1982-11-02) (aged 36) Paris, France
Occupation	Writer, Translator, Activist, Photographer
Notable works	Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983)
Spouse	Julio Cortázar

Carol Dunlop (April 2, 1946 – November 2, 1982) was a writer, translator, activist and photographer. She is best known for being the co-author, with her husband the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, of the book The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1982).

Biography

Dunlop was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was the oldest of two daughters born to Daniel M. and Jean (Ayers) Dunlop. She graduated from McGill University. She married writer François Hebert, with whom she had one son, Stephane, born in 1968. The couple settled in Montreal, Quebec, but divorced sometime in the 1970s, and Dunlop eventually moved to Paris. Dunlop met the writer and activist Julio Cortázar in Canada in 1977 and married him in 1981. She accompanied Cortázar on trips to a number of destinations and sometimes traveled without him. Among the places she visited in the course of her political activism were Nicaragua and Poland; in the latter country, she participated in a congress of solidarity with Chile. She died two years before Cortázar and is buried with him in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Cause of death

There is disagreement about the official cause of Carol Dunlop's death.

According to Cortázar's biographer Miguel Herráez, Dunlop died of "bone marrow failure" ("aplasia medular") and Cortázar of leukemia.^[1][2] Testimonies given by Dunlop's son, Stephane Hebert, and her first husband, Francois Hebert from Montreal, support the bone marrow illness diagnosis. Similarly, many of Dunlop and Cortazar's friends witnessed Dunlop's prolonged sickness, long before Cortázar's alleged HIV contraction.^[3] Her ex-husband, for instance, recalls Dunlop regularly being hospitalized in the early 1970s to undergo blood transfusions, a common treatment for blood marrow failure.^[4]

In her book Julio Cortázar, the Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi, who was a friend of Cortázar and Dunlop, stated that both died of AIDS. Peri Rossi maintained that Dunlop had sexually contracted AIDS from Cortázar, who had himself contracted the illness from a blood transfusion he received a few years earlier in the south of France. There is no concrete evidence available to prove this theory.

Notable works

• Les enfants du sabbat. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), ISBN 2-02-006564-9 – Children of the Black Sabbath (1977, translated by Carol Dunlop-Hébert)
• Carol Dunlop, La solitude inachevée (1976).
• Julio Cortázar, Carol Dunlop, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, (The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute) (1983).
• Julio Cortázar, Carol Dunlop, Silvia Monrós-Stojaković, Correspondencia (2009), Alpha Decay, Barcelona.

References