Customer Reviews

Hopscotch

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the most important, funniest and deepest novel ever written in Argentina (well, one of the TWO most important, if we consider Sábato's "Sobre héroes y tumbas" too), but don't be fooled by Cortázar's sense of humor, the alleged optional chapters at the end of the book are, in fact, the most importat chapters, becasuse in them it lays the book's secret philosophy. Anyway, they are not for everyone, Cortázar was aware of it and that's maybe the reason of it's placement.

A great novel.

Hopscotch is a story (or stories, for it can be read multiple ways) of a bohemian drifter, written in a surrealistic style that is captivates and entrances. I read it last year (in Gregory Rabassa's excellent translation) for a course in Latin American Literature. Normally, at school one is on a time-frame, and is pressured to complete the assigned book at an accelerated pace. I couldn't, however, because I liked the book too much to skim through it.

My advice for readers is, don't be put off by the romance-novel like front cover and the back cover's whimsical plot summary. Hopscotch is far more sober, meaningful, and wonderful than this. On almost every page, there is some unusual metaphor or bit of language that brought a smile to my face. I found the complexity and symbolic depth added to the enjoyment in an intelligent way without making the text difficult or esoteric.

I recommend that you take Cortazar's advice and regard the optional chapters (57-155) as optional. I couldn't help but read some of them--they tempted me and they undoubtedly add layers of depth and meaning--but for the most part they are nowhere near as good as the first 56 and seem almost "tacked-on." Ignoring them cuts the number of pages down to 350 or so instead of 576, and makes the book a good deal more coherent. Then, if you want to, you can read the rest of the chapters, or pick and choose from them as you like. It was Cortazar's intention that the book be treated like an encyclopedia, to be opened up and read in any order. I'm not sure I agree this is the best way to enjoy it, but the beauty is that how deep one goes is always left up to the reader.

This book is magical in that it must be read more than once, and with each reading, a new experience and understanding unfold. First, read it from front to back. Next, read it from back to front. And finally, read through it on a random basis, chapter at a time, in no particular order. I was first introduced to Rayuela in the late 1960's. It still sits on my bookshelf and every so often, I read through it again, and have another 'aha.'

This book, a translation of Rayuela, is THE non linear novel that deals with emotion. It has nothing to do with postmodernism as other reviewer suggests: the Spanish language tends to build longer sentences than american english. This is not a novel that short attention span readers would easily grasp. There's Tolstoi's War and Peace, Joyce's Ulysses, and other novels like this one, that require full immersion. In Hopscotch, the reader is the protagonist while choosing the path that will tie the story together. If you have never read non american authors, or are unfamiliar with Cortazar, I would suggest you start with any of his short story books.

I consider myself well-read and a love rof good literature, but I am afraid this book is just beyond me. It seems to be a stream of existentialist prose or somesuch, and lost me in its turgid non-plot.

I appreciate that many reviewers say they have got a lot from this book, but I would caution the generalist reader.

This book was chosen for my book club, and we all started it in good faith and tried to persist with it. I don't think anyone finished it. In fact at one stage I read out one or two of the more pretentious and portentous passages to my partner, and we ended up rolling around laughing at the meaningless gibberish posing as serious insight. Predates post-modernism, but seems to anticipate all its pseud-cred!

Salman Rushdie supposedly called it "fiendishly esoteric". I think that MAY translate as "I'm a very self-important windbag, and I didn't understand a bloody word either!"

One thing you won't find in Julio Cortazar's many excellent short stories is anything in the way of biographical data and Cortazar is thus a mysterious figure to his readers who constructs fictions from some marginal unidentifiable place. If you want to know about Cortazar the man you have to research on your own. Born in Belgium(1914) to Argentine parents the family returned to Argentina after WW1 . Julio grew up and attended university and made a living as a translator(Poe and others). Though offered a university position he refused it in protest of the Peron government and thus spent many years teaching grade school(which may explain why so many childrens or naive adult prespectives are employed in his work) then he left for Paris sometime in the fifties. So in Paris he wrote in exile and played trumpet in a Jazz band and lived the life of the boheme until his death in 1984. Hopscotch therefore with its bohemian characters and situations may lead one to assume Horacio is a sort of fictional version of Cortazar. I thought that at first and that was one reason the book was so exciting because I already liked his stories so much. The book is exciting to a point but I think it demands more patience with its methods than some may wish to give it. You can't really compare it to a novel in any conventional sense because there is very little plot and the characters exist only in mere sketch form, we know them only by the ideas they have. This works in Musil, an author mentioned in Hopscotch, but Man Without Quailities is a novel with many dimensions(political, historical, cultural, social)whereas Hopscotch only has one dimension. Since the novel/collage is 564 pages you may find yourself tiring of Horacios thoughts. And I don't think Horacio is a fictional Cortazar. I think Cortazar is writing a modern novel about a hyper modern creature. All of the things lacking in modernism are also lacking in Horacio. I think Cortazar may sympathize with Horacio but he is ultimately using him to show how lost someone can get when he is divorced from all those spheres of activity(political, historical, cultural, social)that modernism ignores. I read Hopscotch now differently than when I first read it. Now I perhaps see better that what is missing from it is a crucial part of it and perhaps such is the art of the collage artist. An art which remains incomplete...free in its unhibited exploration of the exile with no ties, yes, but as Janis Joplin said "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose".

I initially read this book after reading all of Cortazars short stories and immediately found myself at home in Cortazar's bohemian world of books and conversations and meditations about the nature of things. But after a few hours in the hypertextual space of Hopscotch where ideas are more real than people I was getting homesick for a good solid plot and some good solid characters that interact with each other on something more than just an abstract level. Really the only memorable character is Horacio himself because we only know La Maga, his mistress, through his endless musings about her and the other characters are just names. The novel is really therefore just paragraphs of thoughts and the thoughts are not really strung together into any consistent philosophy in fact the thoughts are just offered as little flashes of cleverness that don't really move the characters that have them nor the world around them, the ideas do not have any productive or conducive value, they just serve to stave off boredom. I suppose you could read the book as the first postmodern text because it does seem to exist on a plane outside of historical process and context. It is kind of thrilling to experience the liberation the formal arrangement that Hopscotch presents until one realizes all the jumping around leads nowhere. But then perhaps that is the point.
Salman Rushdie has called this the best book of the century. I think Rushdie perhaps reads some of his own story into Cortazars. Both men were exiles from countries with troubled histories and both write in European metropolises. They both write very postmodern novels about the fragmented nature of identity and the difficulty of wholeness which in their case is compounded by the divided nature of their own personal histories.

It's been a while since I read Hopscotch. My memory of it is vague, but it made a considerable impression on me. It is one of those peculiar novels that has long, boring stretches, that you continue reading because you are convinced that there is a secret there, and you believe that you must persist in reading the book in order to uncover this secret. There are long passages where Oliveira and his little literary coterie sit around in Paris and listen to jazz gossiping and spinning out wild theories and being clever, and these passages can be unbelievably tedious. But you keep reading.

I recently read an interesting interview with Cortazar in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that may be of interest to some of you. Here's Cortazar on Hopscotch (Rayuela): "There have been critics who have thought Rayuela to be a profoundly pessimistic book in the sense that it only laments the state of affairs. I believe it is a profoundly optimistic book because Oliveira, despite his quarrelsome nature, as we Argentinians say, his fits of anger, his mental mediocrity, his head against all that because he is essentially an optimist, because he believes that one day, not for him but for others, that wall will fall and on the other side will be the kibbutz of desire, the millennium, authentic man, the humanity he's dreamt of but which had not been a reality until that moment. Rayuela was written before my political and ideological stand, before my first trip to Cuba. I realized many years later that Oliveira is a little like Lenin, and don't take this as a pretense. It is an analogy in the sense that both are optimists, each in his own way. Lenin would not have fought so if he had not believed in man. One must believe in man. Lenin is profoundly optimistic, the same as Trotsky. Just as Stalin is a pessimist, Lenin and Trotsky are optimists. And Oliveira in his small, mediocre way is also. Because the alternative is to shoot oneself or simply keep on living and accepting all that is good in life. The Western world has many good things. So the general idea in Rayuela is the realization of failure and the hope to triumph. The book proposes no solutions; it limits itself simply to showing the possible ways of knocking down the wall to see what's on the other side."

If you can find a copy of Cortazar's A Manual for Manuel, it is interesting as well -- Cortazar owned up to the fact that it was hastily written attempt to render revolutionary politics in an experimental literary form. I tried to convince the guy who runs Dalkey Archive Press to get the rights to publish A Manual for Manuel, and he wrote back telling me he had been trying for ages, but with no luck.

This book is a work of genius and has been an influence on my novel writing. I think that Cortazar is a latter-day Joyce who is separated from the magic realism.

Hopscotch has interesting characters. It is nearly impossible to summarize the whole story because there are 2 choices to make but the story changes its theme when read in 2 different ways. However, it is not like a choose your adventure either. Cortazar celebrates human freedom and free will in a rather sensual manner which is quite startling.

rayuela, as is the name in Spanish of this magnificent novel, makes us think about game, the supreme activity to distract the mind and to create, and that is exactly what the author is doing here, playing with the reader, taunting him/her to follow through the galleries of his creative mind, to find amid the pieces the jewel of creation.... LUIS MENDEZ luismendez@codetel.net.do