Hopscotch (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

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!"


The Great Julio's Collage   January 31, 2002
Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States)
22 out of 27 found this review helpful

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".


Not for the plot-hungry, but worth it for enthusiasts   January 1, 2005
Steven Reynolds (Sydney, Australia)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful

I suppose it's unreasonable to expect the world's first so-called hypertext novel - one in which you can read the chapters sequentially, or in an order recommended by the author, or in any other order you choose - to have a compelling plot. After all, plot relies on anticipation and surprise, both of which come from authorial control over how and when information is revealed. A lot of the delight in fiction comes from this, and most of the rest from character, theme and the texture of the language. Cortazar's revolutionary novel is big on the last few, but not unexpectedly fails to be very engaging when it comes to story. It's more of a character study, or rather an elaboration of a philosophical position through the depiction of certain people in a particular place and time, i.e. left-leaning international emigres in 1950s Paris, and later the locals in Buenos Aires, who spend most of their time smoking, drinking, listening to jazz, competing for affection, philosophizing about life, and trying not to be the creative geniuses they obviously know they are. There are some wonderful set pieces: the infamous Chapter 28 involving a baby in a darkened room; the afternoon a plank bridge is erected to join two hotel rooms on opposite sides of a busy Buenos Aires street; an elaborate booby trap of water-filled basins, tangled threads and ball-bearings to thwart a vengeful lover in the night; and, obviously, the hopscotch squares of the title which are drawn in the courtyard of an insane asylum. These incidents are all engaging, comic, and wonderfully laden with a metaphorical/philosophical import which serves Cortazar's embedded theme: that is, the conundrum of consciousness; the unending desire to break through "the wall" to the other side of life in order to achieve the "unity" we intuitively feel exists but to which there is no easy path. This is the novel's engine, but it does take a while to fire up. If slowly savouring 500+ pages of that kind of thing interests you, then you'll enjoy "Hopscotch" immensely. If it doesn't, then reading this novel will be somewhat like being trapped at a really bad party with drunk and depressive philosophy undergraduates who think they know everything about jazz. I had the urge to leave early, but I'm glad I stayed until the end. Eventually, someone shut the music off, opened all the windows, and in the silence of dawn something clicked.


Rich, Fantastic, enjoyable,.....   January 17, 2000
Filip Roshauw (Oslo, Norway)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful

Sometimes, a reader has the pleasure and opportunity to read something truly great, something that changes the readers way of thinking permanently. I recently had such an opportunity. Julio Cortazars Hopscotch is a miraculous book bubbling over with allusions, philosophical digressions and, first and foremost, outstanding writing. The book's form is reminiscent of James Joyce, constantly exploring new ways of writing. To recall the mood of this book, imagine the cast of "The Sun also rises", throw in some Beckett absurdisms, metaphysics, Paris in the 50's, a lovestory and some jazz. This is one way of describing Hopscotch. But, the best way of getting to know this mind-changing novel is to order the book, log of the net and start reading. And, when youre done, read it again. And, by the way, this book is even more enjoyable with the accompanyment of either Mingus' "Blues and roots", Coltranes "Blue Train" or Miles' "Kind of Blue". I hope you all will get the same kind of joy out of this book as I did.