Word: hopscotchã
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...most beautiful, complex portraits we have of the idealism and subsequent disillusionment of that decade. Cortázar—a literary heavyweight in Latin America, associated with the prolific Boom period of the 60s and 70s—wrote “Hopscotch?? in 1963, after his move to France to escape dictator Juan Domingo Perón, and its Left Bank influences are clear. In stunningly tactile prose, the novel follows pseudo-autobiographical protagonist Horacio Oliveira, also an Argentinean expatriate, through his nights of jazz, cigarette smoke, and intellectual conversation in Paris with a group...
...What makes “Hopscotch?? worth returning to, more than anything else, is simply the language itself. The words, rich with sensuous description, overflow their narrative bounds; winding sentences, propelled by commas, curl into perfect metaphors. The reader experiences the glow of a cigarette “slowly sketching out the shapes of his insomnia,” a passing moment as “putting down an empty glass on the table,” light as a “dove in the hands of a madman.” (For the sleek rendering...
...Cortázar’s demands on the reader’s engagement are perhaps most obvious, however, in the novel’s structure. “Hopscotch?? can be read either linearly, from Chapter 1 through Chapter 155, or it can be tackled in the order suggested by the fanciful “Table of Instructions” provided at the beginning of the book, which sends the reader “hopscotching” from one chapter to another based on the loosest of associations. Such “make your own adventure?...
...forgotten by everyone in the scenes that follow; similarly, La Maga’s absence doesn’t give rise to the conventional narrative arc. Oliveira half-heartedly looks for her, but his restlessness has much deeper roots. Like so much literature of the 60s, “Hopscotch?? is—at its core—about a more metaphysical search. “It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses...
...which may seem alien or antagonistic to the time and history surrounding it, and which nonetheless includes it, explains it, and in the last analysis orients it towards a transcendence within whose limits man is waiting.” No light task. The ultimate success of “Hopscotch?? lies in the cock-eyed bravery of its attempt...
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