Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar – a review by Richard Skinner

Hopscotch

Julio Cortázar

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, Pantheon Books, 1966

a review by Richard Skinner

Julio Cortázar’s postmodernist novel Hopscotch is a novel of forking paths. On the one hand, you can read chapters 1–56 in order. That way, we follow the story of Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual slumming it in 1960s Paris. Oliveira is in love with a woman called Lucía, whom he calls ‘La Maga’ (‘The Magician’). We follow their life in Paris. There is a mix of conventional dialogue/action scenes with non-narrative discourse. He, La Maga and their group of bohemian friends from (among other places) Herzegovina and Montevideo hang out in bars and bedrooms, playing jazz records and squabbling existentially with each other. Nothing much happens. And yet everything. The mundanity of everyday life is raised to the level of the sublime and vice versa. So far, so good.

On the other hand, before the novel starts, Cortázar inserts a suggestion to the reader that they should read the novel haphazardly. He issues a ‘table of instructions’ that requires the reader to hop from chapter to chapter, seemingly without connection. This way, reading the novel is like watching a film whose scenes are edited in the wrong order. When I say ‘wrong’, I am wrong, of course. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to order events. Conventional narrative observes the laws of cause and effect but this sequence places ‘consecutiveness’ above causality. Things happen in spite of, not because of, what has happened before.

Cortázar’s suggestion means that causality becomes a casualty. Set this way, scenes are placed in harsh juxtaposition. Jolted out of our expectations, we lurch from scene to scene, fumbling to make a connection where there is seemingly none. At first, this is bewildering, but at some point, this bewilderment becomes exhilaration. At the end of each section, we have no idea what will happen next. Time and again, we are pulled back to zero. Now, we are walking through the story, not in a straight line, but in Brownian motion. And isn’t that a more natural way to experience a place and time? Nature is chaos, not order. We put events into an order so as to understand them – plot them into a story – but life itself is haphazard, isn’t it?

Hopscotch is a random amble through the city. Because there’s no linear narrative flow, you can dip in and out of the book, never knowing how close or far away you are from the end. An aimless walk, a wander without purpose. It takes time to adjust, but once accepted, it becomes addictive. Cortázar’s interest in the layout of Paris bears similarities with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and André Breton’s novel Nadja: ‘Paris is a centre, you understand, a mandala through which one must pass without dialectics, a labyrinth where pragmatic formulas are of no use except to get lost in.’

Published in Buenos Aires in 1963 (and in English in 1966), Cortázar’s novel was written at the height of the postmodern project (interestingly, its aleatory technique was adopted at the same time by composer John Cage, who used the I Ching to compose many of his pieces). His fellow Latin American authors quickly recognised Cortázar’s achievement and his novel is now regarded, along with Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as the greatest novel published in the Spanish language since Don Quixote. His successor is fellow enfant terrible Roberto Bolaño, whose mammoth (and astonishing) novel 2666 (2004) might be read as a homage to Cortázar. Although now more than sixty years old, the play and freedom found in Hopscotch, its sense of dislocation and displaced identities, seem astoundingly current. Over those years, Hopscotch has not lost its zest for life one jot.

Richard Skinner has published three novels with Faber. He has also published two collections of essays: Vade Mecum (Zer0 Books, 2015) and Joiners (Vanguard Editions, 2019), with a third collection, entitled Undercurrents, due from Broken Sleep Books in July 2025. He is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy, where he teaches a variety of courses on fiction and life writing.

https://richardskinner.weebly.com/