honeydunce

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch remains one of the most influential and significant novels to appear in Latin America after the Second World War. It is, in part, notorious for its unusual presentation: it comes with a “Table of Instructions”. There Cortázar announces: “In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.”
The volume itself consists of 155 chapters. Cortázar suggests that the book can be read simply from the beginning to chapter 56, where the book can be considered to end — “the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.” The alternative he proposes is to begin with chapter 73 and then proceed according to a sequence listed in the “Table of Instructions”. (For convenience, each chapter ends with an indication of the next that is to be read in this particular sequence.) Needless to say, this version does not end with chapter 56.
To many readers this sounds like a contrivance that is too clever by half. Rest assured: it is not. The book allows for these — and other — readings. Indeed it can even be read front to back in its entirety.
The first section — From the Other Side — (56 chapters in some 361 pages) is fairly straightforward. The “expendable chapters” that make up the second section — From Diverse Sides — are considerably shorter (99 of them in just over 200 pages) and include a variety of notes, embellishments, quotes, even an Octavio Paz poem. They can be considered as integral to the text, or merely as support for it (or, as Cortázar suggests, as entirely expendable).
The story centers around Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine living a fragmentary life in Paris and the Buenos Aires. As Cortázar makes clear, the text does not depend on any chronological order. The many episodes from Oliveira’s life can be read in any variety of sequences without altering the gist of the novel.