Rating: 
Summary: Uh-huh (clearing throat)
Review: I consider myself well-read and a love rof good literature, but I am afraid this book is just beyond me. It seems to be a stream of existentialist prose or somesuch, and lost me in its turgid non-plot. 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!"
Rating: 
Summary: My favorite book
Review: I have read "Hopscotch" three times in a span of 30 years. Each time I read it I found new meanings and more layers. It helps that my first language is Spanish. Translations usually take some details that embelish the original "Rayuela" (Hopscotch). Still, I have read it in the English version, and is a masterpiece. The world of Cortazar is magic and if you can enter it, may be you'll never find the way out...
Rating: 
Summary: a surreal/boheme postmodern picaresque
Review: I initially read this book after reading all of Cortazars short stories and immediately found myself at home in Cortazar's bohemian world of books and conversations and meditations about the nature of things. But after a few hours in the hypertextual space of Hopscotch where ideas are more real than people I was getting homesick for a good solid plot and some good solid characters that interact with each other on something more than just an abstract level. Really the only memorable character is Horacio himself because we only know La Maga, his mistress, through his endless musings about her and the other characters are just names. The novel is really therefore just paragraphs of thoughts and the thoughts are not really strung together into any consistent philosophy in fact the thoughts are just offered as little flashes of cleverness that don't really move the characters that have them nor the world around them, the ideas do not have any productive or conducive value, they just serve to stave off boredom. I suppose you could read the book as the first postmodern text because it does seem to exist on a plane outside of historical process and context. It is kind of thrilling to experience the liberation the formal arrangement that Hopscotch presents until one realizes all the jumping around leads nowhere. But then perhaps that is the point.
Salman Rushdie has called this the best book of the century. I think Rushdie perhaps reads some of his own story into Cortazars. Both men were exiles from countries with troubled histories and both write in European metropolises. They both write very postmodern novels about the fragmented nature of identity and the difficulty of wholeness which in their case is compounded by the divided nature of their own personal histories.
Rating:
Summary: Unforgetable
Review: I read Hopscotch four years ago and still can't get it out of my head. Cortazar's allusions alone can lead to the reading list of a lifetime, but his wry humor and self-deprecating cynicism keep the book from becoming pretentious, and his descriptions of love are downright tender. Like Kundera and Camus, Cortazar fuses narrative and philosophy. The only problem is that after you read Hopscotch, almost every other novel seems unbearably bland.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the plot-hungry, but worth it for enthusiasts
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A completely impossible book
Review: I'm finding myself at a bit of a loss for words here. I'm feeling oddly stretched and squeezed, uneasy. You see, on one hand I would gladly heap every sort of compliment I can think of on this novel of Cortazar's, for it certainly deserves to be called
pretty good!
On the other, there are several irritating difficulties with reviewing it at all.
One: writing doesn't get any more intimate. This particular tender bubble of words nearly touches Oliveira's skin. His desires, his dreams, even his (very proper and logical) selfishness are not just reported, they are flown to us on the kites of Cortazar's winding, coiling sentences. If there is any one feature that can make a book truly great, it must be this astonishing ability to genuinely communicate what language, that dusty collection of signs and intonations designed to let you haggle over the price of salmon or, for example, a used car, by definition cannot accomplish.
Language can't relate anything "inner"! I don't know if Cortazar would agree with this (an interview with him that another reviewer on this site quotes surprised me with lack of understanding of his own work), but Oliveira certainly would; the "books" of Morelli, for example, the literature-devouring idol of the Club, owe their stealthy and outrageous power to precisely NOT trying to weave a narrative or, indeed, advance any ideas. Morelli's books, judging by what excerpts and hints we get in "Hopscotch," impress with a kind of vacuum, with what they haven't got. Morelli brandishes the sort of mute suggestiveness that, having tossed the reader some shreds of psychology and plot, leaves him somehow unsatisfied - exactly the point of pages and pages of tedium! - and so hints at a region of mind which words can only swim around, a sort of Moses' basket floating god knows where while we fling allusions and criticisms at each other from the banks.
Neither "Hopscotch" nor its offshoot "62" are books of quite this sort in that Cortazar has his beautiful style to get the point across. That point, however, is Morelli's, and it's not much of one because, as should have become clear by now, nine-tenths of that fantastic truth about ourselves and the world is hidden from conscious understanding by a sort of perpetual blind spot as enormous and inescapable (at least by the time we are old enough to start having suspicions) as the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. A writer of immense talent can, at best, improve the ratio to three-fourths, but never fully knock down the barrier between the ordinary, the verbal, the "left-brain" etc. etc., what Oliveira at one point calls "the territory," and the mysterious dream zone, La Maga's zone, completely. Lesser and later writers like Haruki Murakami can barely even describe the tension.
Oliveira's attempt to do just that most impossible of things, that is, to bring together at last the "conscious" and the "unconscious" is what makes "Hospcotch" one of the greatest books ever written, and also one of the last. Yes, literature, whether of the traditional, naturalistically dumb sort or by modernists like Morelli, ended some years ago. It followed its enthusiasts to the grave.
A proof, good sirs? Simply read the reviews here - and there are only 31! On Amazon! For a book such as this! - and you'll quickly discover just how REMOTE any prospect of even understanding Cortazar's and Oliveira's project has become so far as the younger generation is concerned. Exceptions and social miscarriages aside, they are as incapable of grasping what "this is all about" as dodos were of flight.
This is another reason why I, though edging to the limit on article length, still feel that no true review of "Hopscotch" can be written. The only way out of this mess for you, I'm afraid, is to buy the book. For what kind of review is it that no one can understand? Gibberish, and likewise "Hopscotch" reads like gibberish to many. At one time - Oliveira's time - impoverishment of language and hence understanding seemed like something out of Orwell, something in-the-coming and hopefully-not-in-our-day, and yet here we are. The ceiling has fallen. To do away with the blind spot, to break the crust on the mind, even to refuse to enter society's silly games, these ideals nowadays sound like something out of Cervantes. But if so, what chance is there for modern readers to appreciate such a work?
Truth be told, Cortazar has suffered from this advent of "generalist readers" - thank you for the phrase, kind "saliero"! - more than Joyce, whose experiments were more obviously radical and actual ideas, on the whole, far less intriguing, or Musil, always, even at his subtlest, a rationalist. Cortazar's Oliveira was neither here nor there, a vulnerable, endearing goof of an intellectual with absolutely no chance of suvival, as he himself realized, in what the world was already becoming. But we can get to know his story, at least.
Order of reading, my advice: use the second method of reading Cortazar suggests in the preface, the one that takes you through all of the "optional" chapters. This isn't a book worth spending a little time on: either be prepared to invest (a better word) a lot or don't bother at all. When you are done with the second method, go back to the other, linear succession of chapters in Book I and just re-read a few in a row. Then it will dawn on you how MUCH you would have missed had you settled for this faster and more "economical" order, and your love of Cortazar, by then in full bloom, will be consummated.
Rating: 
Summary: wading through beat-trash to find nuggets of good writing
Review: if you think howl is a good poem, then you will probably find hopscotch to be a brilliant novel. this book is chock full of bad name dropping and bohemian pretense. it didnt take long for me to tire of smokey rooms and bad jazz records. im baffled that everyone here is raving about this book...i mean there are some well written passages, but they are FEW and FAR BETWEEN. cortazar is definitely in the second or third tier of latin american novelists, he is no borges or marquez. the reviews here got me exciting, but the writing was extremely disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: What is on the other side?
Review: It's been a while since I read Hopscotch. My memory of it is vague, but it made a considerable impression on me. It is one of those peculiar novels that has long, boring stretches, that you continue reading because you are convinced that there is a secret there, and you believe that you must persist in reading the book in order to uncover this secret. There are long passages where Oliveira and his little literary coterie sit around in Paris and listen to jazz gossiping and spinning out wild theories and being clever, and these passages can be unbelievably tedious. But you keep reading. I recently read an interesting interview with Cortazar in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that may be of interest to some of you. Here's Cortazar on Hopscotch (Rayuela): "There have been critics who have thought Rayuela to be a profoundly pessimistic book in the sense that it only laments the state of affairs. I believe it is a profoundly optimistic book because Oliveira, despite his quarrelsome nature, as we Argentinians say, his fits of anger, his mental mediocrity, his head against all that because he is essentially an optimist, because he believes that one day, not for him but for others, that wall will fall and on the other side will be the kibbutz of desire, the millennium, authentic man, the humanity he's dreamt of but which had not been a reality until that moment. Rayuela was written before my political and ideological stand, before my first trip to Cuba. I realized many years later that Oliveira is a little like Lenin, and don't take this as a pretense. It is an analogy in the sense that both are optimists, each in his own way. Lenin would not have fought so if he had not believed in man. One must believe in man. Lenin is profoundly optimistic, the same as Trotsky. Just as Stalin is a pessimist, Lenin and Trotsky are optimists. And Oliveira in his small, mediocre way is also. Because the alternative is to shoot oneself or simply keep on living and accepting all that is good in life. The Western world has many good things. So the general idea in Rayuela is the realization of failure and the hope to triumph. The book proposes no solutions; it limits itself simply to showing the possible ways of knocking down the wall to see what's on the other side." If you can find a copy of Cortazar's A Manual for Manuel, it is interesting as well -- Cortazar owned up to the fact that it was hastily written attempt to render revolutionary politics in an experimental literary form. I tried to convince the guy who runs Dalkey Archive Press to get the rights to publish A Manual for Manuel, and he wrote back telling me he had been trying for ages, but with no luck.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent representation of the postmodern perspective.
Review: Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch is the extrados of the postmodern approach. The allegorical possibilities are limitless. The existensialism and alienation factors of this work are representative of Cortazar's genius. The ability of the author to incorporate two books in one, appeals to the intellectual and transcendental qualities revealed in this work. This is a "must read" for the serious modern fiction reader.
Rating:
Summary: For a multidimensional and modern narrative
Review: Many people think that the word interaction is a XXI century concept related to computers and cyberspace, but it as far as literature goes, this is one of the oldest concepts pursued by many writers. Argentinian Julio Cortázar comes as one of the most important authors to seek such structure with his monumental novel "Hopscotch", written in 1964.
Not only history did influence Cortázar in his writings, but also European Vanguards have a major role in his literary project -- most notably Cubism. The non-linear narrative of "Hopscotch" makes its structure reads like a hopscotch game. Reading the novel feels like jumping from one square to another, back and forth. Using that, the author tries to violate the rules established of writing and narrative structure.
If one chooses to read "Hopscotch" in the linear fashion --both ways are possibilities -- there are 155 chapters in three sections: "From the Other Side," "From This Side," and "From Diverse Sides" (subtitled "Expendable Chapters"). And in the introduction the reader will find a "Table of Instructions." There, we learn that two approved readings of the book are possible: from Chapter 1 through 56 "in a normal fashion" (i), or from Chapter 73 to Chapter 1 to... well, wherever the chapters lead. Each has a numeric indicator of the subsequent chapter following its terminal sentence. In this way, we do not know which chapter to expect next until it is time to actually read it.
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer living in the bohemian Paris of the 50s. After losing her lover, known as La Maga, he returns to his Buenos Aires to continue his picaresque adventures.
Another structure used in the novel is the labyrinth -- like the labyrinth of streets where Oliveira usually meets La Maga in Paris. And this also alludes to an emotional labyrinth to which both he and she will be trapped. By the way, emotion -- not the regular one-- has a major role in the narrative. All Oliveira's friends are somehow emotionally damaged -- trying to cope with their depression and problems.
However much the structure sounds like off putting, the novel reads smoothly once one gets into the cubism of the narrative. Needless to say that the reader must appreciated the bohemian way of life -- including alcohol and drugs, and art discussion -- to be interested in the book.
With his "Hopscotch", Cortázar defies his readers. Playing this game is worth the candle. Experienced readers will be delighted with the structure of hypertext and all the possibilities of reading this novel.
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