Used to be one of my favorite books. I've been looking at this on our shelf and home and I think I'm primed for a re-read. There's two ways to read the book - either straight through the first 2/3 of it (Chapters 1-56) OR you follow the chapter numbers specified at the bottom of the page (Choose Your Own Adventure style). I think I've only done the latter once, so I'm going to try that way again. I hope I still like it after all of this time... ( )

The reader can become complacent in the non-stop hopscotch, or can find it rather irritating and become traversed in the daunting task that often times forces him to read a single-page chapter, skipping back three hundred seventy six pages to read a mere two pages before fast forwarding another four hundred and fifty five for what seems a pointless four paragraphs then backtracking five pages for two sentences. It is not without purpose though, as the further along the reader hops, the more the reader understands why he jumped from one square to the next. The author is allowed a new type of control but also an exploration of his own novel through this game of hopscotch. The illogical continuation becomes logical because the reader is not expecting a logical connection therefore never knows what to expect, and becomes trapped in a constant anticipatory state. This in itself is an existential feeling, a theory Horacio Oliveira returns to often in his debates with his other bohemian friends and members of The Club. The reader quickly recognizes the playful spirit of the author; and laughing along with the author’s practical joke can become as thrilling as a rollercoaster ride of constantly flipping from the ‘expendable chapters’ back to the pre-expendable aka chapters from ‘the other side’. However, the longer the reader spends in the expendable chapters (post chapter 56) the more accepting he becomes of the surreal and eventually melts into the dream landscape that is illustrated so gloriously by Cortazar himself, achieving the writers grand aspiration of painting with words. The reader escapes the Rembrandt of pre-56 and becomes confronted with a Magritte in the post-56. In a typical René Magritte painting, conventional objects are placed in an unorthodox context, for example, a steam train races out of a fireplace towards the unknown in his painting “Time Transfixed”. During the odyssey through the deserted desert of the expendable chapters, after short newspaper clippings, the odd Octavio Paz poem, numerous existential quandaries, and possibly a dream explanation or a sexual encounter, the reader will finally be rewarded with the return to the ‘reality’ of pre-56. While hopping back, he takes off his sand-drenched combat boots, puts on his lumberjacket and is transplanted back as a bohemian in Paris during the late 1950’s to a place where a pot of strong yerba mate is being procured by a familiar thin figure who poses as his muse, at which time the reader may or may not notice a sick infant sleeping nearby. “Perhaps that is why he chose the novel form for his meanderings, and published in addition what he kept on finding or unfinding.” (Cortazar p. 441) The reader has two options: to accept this constant travel between dimensions or to shut the book entirely, stand up, sit down and realize that the he is no longer Horacio Oliveira, Morelli, The Traveler, or Julio Cortazar but he was simply a reader seized in an expendable universe. “Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.”(Cortazar p. 111) ( )

Hopscotch is an odd novel, written as a series of short, staccato chapters that can be arranged at the whim of the reader. Cortazar suggests two schemes: reading only chapters 1-56 in order, or a longer route that involves reading all 155 chapters (excluding one) in an order set down at the start. He also mentions that reading only the odd or even chapters is also acceptable. I suspect that many people, like me, read to the second scheme, because it is the only one that involves reading almost all of the book.
The first 56 chapters contain the bulk of the narrative. It follows the story of Oliveira, an Argentinian intellectual living in Paris. He is part of 'The Club', a group of intellectuals and Bohemians. Oliveira's mistress, known as La Maga, is a relative ingenue. She doesn't understand much of what the Club talk about, and is treated by them as a sort of pet, despite showing herself to be more than their equal when it comes to understanding other people. Oliveira and La Maga's relationship is strained, because he fails to understand his feelings for La Maga, largely because he tries to intellectualize them. When tragedy causes La Maga to run away, The Club drift apart, and Oliveira returns to Argentina alone, where he engages in a series of aimless employments, haunted by the spectre of his former lover. His distance from the Bohemian lifestyle of Paris allows him to reassess his relationship with La Maga, which has disturbing effects on his relationships with other people.

The extra, interpolated chapters are a mish-mash of ideas. They occasionally give deeper insight into the thoughts of characters and into the narrative itself. They also introduce Morelli, the putative writer of Oliveira's story (though Oliveira and other characters frequently discuss Morelli). There are also other quotes and ideas thrown in, some of which inform the narrative in obvious ways, others which are seemingly random. These interpolated chapters have the effect of creating an entirely different book, because the reader understands more about the motives behind narrative events (and occasionally the outcomes of them), creating a different set of tensions and altering their perception of the characters.

With such a complex book, and one so rich in ideas, it seems a bit anti-climactic to report that it was just okay. Not great, not terrible, but just okay. The narrative itself was interesting, and Oliveira is both intellectually complex and frailly human in a really believable way, but I found thoughts and conversations of him and 'The Club' truly irritating, over-intellectualized in a way that drove me crazy. It was a spewing out of ideas, an idea of life a sort of word-association game, that, I think, always sounds much cleverer than it actually is. I realise that it was part of the point to construct characters as antitheses to La Maga, but they were a bit much. The 56 chapter narrative is also largely built around 3 or 4 long set-pieces, a couple of which I found too absurd for words. The extremity of the characters' Bohemian posings really got in the way of me liking them, or even being interested in them.
As for the interpolations, they were very hit-and-miss. As I said, sometimes they turned the narrative, and my understanding of it, on its head, and sometimes a simple quote planted a seed that would germinate as the subsequent chapter unfolds. In this respect Cortazar was very successful, because he genuinely created very different books out of a single narrative. However, too often my mind skipped, or the interpolation did nothing for the narrative, and I felt like I had been swindled into reading a couple of extra pointless pages. Again, I think it is part of the point that the extra chapters help you as a reader create the book that you are reading, including the bits you skip or fail to understand, but sometimes I found it wearisome.

If I had my time again, I would read the 56 chapter narrative first, then contemplate re-reading with the interpolations. As it is, I can never go back because I have already read and understood Hopscotch one way, and cannot undo it.It was a tremendously interesting and ambitious work, but not one that was always successful.

As Cortazar's Table of Instructions will inform you, "Hopscotch consists of . . . two books above all." Do not read the second one. A reader can volunteer to be launched after nearly every chapter of the relatively conventional narrative contained in chapters 1-56 (the first book) into a grab bag of unimpressive quotations from good authors, awful literary theory attributed to "Morelli" and scattered narrative chapters that the plot can do without. This disruptive method of reading "Hopscotch" is most tolerant of its experiment with form, most in harmony with the psyche of the novel's protagonist and, perhaps, most in line with the author's intentions. It is how I read the book and I enjoyed it soooo much less because of that decision.

The desultory and labyrinthine experience of integrating all of the scraps from the cutting room floor into the midst of an otherwise thought-provoking and well-crafted narrative, robs Cortazar's novel of its grace and is likely to rob many readers of their patience. It is an unusual sensation to be in the middle of a book and to have absolutely no idea how many pages separate you from the ending; just as it is unusually frustrating to lose your place when it means scanning back and forth through twelve jumpy chapters to find it. Perhaps the experience is meant to be more like life than reading.

Every time that I realized that the upcoming appendix-chapter that was about to draw my attention away from Horacio's existence was classified as "Morelliana" I sobbed inwardly and throttled imaginary songbirds. If you feel indulgent towards self-important amateurs who sit around and ramble about matters that have been written about with intelligence and skill, or if you like it when young novelists try to propound grand theories of aesthetics based mostly on the strength of their pride, you *may* have patience for Morelli's contributions, which, unfortunately, make up somewhere near half of the extra chapters. "What Morelli is looking for is to break the reader's mental habits." Thanks, I got it and I also understand that a reader can use Morelli as a lense to gain some insight into Cortazar's novel and into the sort of milieu that his characters inhabit. It's just that Cortazar is actually a gifted story-teller with a poet's attention to memorable and overlooked detail whose work draws no strength from these digressions.

To a degree, Horacio and his buddies suffer from a similarly vapid chattiness. If I had to spend an evening with his Club in Paris, I don't think I could become drunk enough to find them unpretentious.If this review seems harsh, it is because after reading "Autonauts of the Cosmosphere" I had very high hopes for Cortazar's other works.

On the bright side: "Hopscotch" is often comical and sharply phrased. It is interesting to watch Horacio struggle amongst his associates to satisfy himself with a small cast of women, even if those women suffer from the sort of wide-eyed, uninitiated magical simplicity that gets really old in the hands of the surrealists and their devotees. At least, the chapters set in an Argentinian mental hospital are fun as hell. ( )