“If my mate runs out I’ve had it,” Oliveira thought. The novel offers puzzles within the larger puzzle, like chapter 34, with its list of seemingly unrelated sentence fragments, but it also, as Scott Esposito wrote in The Quarterly Conversation, is “a novel of traditional literary pleasures: imaginative prose, probing characterization, believable dialog, and rich metaphorical musings.” Esposito quotes this passage as an example: I hope the readers find that helpful, because it’s as close as the text gets to an explanation for its peculiar formal structure. This polemic for fractious fiction is attributed to Morelli, a minor character in the novel with unconventional ideas about writing.įor example, in some passages, Morelli tries to justify his own narrative incoherence, maintaining that a life story, such as it comes to us in so-called reality, is not a movie but still photography, that is to say, that we cannot grasp the action, only a few of its “eleatically recorded fragments.” (Yes, I checked on Google books, and can confirm that Hopscotch is the only novel in existence that uses the word eleatically.) The Eleatics, though, (like Parmenides and Zeno) rejected the idea that sensory experience told us anything about reality instead they argued for a rationalist, timeless, unitary Being - time and matter were illusions. What do you miss if you skip the last 99 chapters of Hopscotch? Well, you won’t get to read various defenses for a fragmented, discontinuous novel, a novel that bears an uncanny resemblance to the book you have in your hands. For these stick-in-the-muds, he grants permission to read the novel in traditional sequence, from chapters 1 through 56, but he then asks them to ignore the remaining 99 chapters - more than 200 pages of text! Which raises the obvious question: can my friend learn anything from peeking at the last page, if it doesn’t really contain the end of the novel?
To make matters more interesting, he asks readers to skip chapter 55 completely (I will admit I cheated and read it anyway), and to read one of the chapters twice.ĭoes that sound confusing? Well, Cortázar has some pity on those narrow-minded souls still caught up in the antiquated linear reading paradigm. He invites them to start the novel at chapter 73 and then proceed through the novel’s 155 sections in a prescribed order - Cortázar gives a list of the alternative sequence in his “Table of Instructions” - leaping back and forth in the book, until they finally finish, having already read 132 through 155, with chapter 131. Julio Cortázar has left even bolder suggestions for readers of his experimental novel Hopscotch, published 50 years ago today, June 28. “I want to make sure it has a good ending,” he explained. I ONCE MET A MAN who claimed he always read the last paragraph of any novel before he turned to page one.
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