Hopscotch

Rating:
Summary: It's just OK
Review: Oliveira is completely lost, and so are Etienne, Gregorovius and the rest of the Club. Problem is they all talk like one person, you can hardly see the difference. And Cortazar as well. They use the same terms and are -not close as you may think- but very far from their feelings, in a pointless, cocky and false metaphisic adventure. Book goes bad up to chapter 21. Then, in chapters 79 and 22 has a chance to get through, but loses it. Rest of the book is mere distraction for the reader not to realize the failure of the author. Cortazar knows (as Morelli) what is needed to write a great novel, but he can't do it.

Rating:
Summary: Just Great
Review: One of the most original works of the century that hearkens back to Joyce, Proust, Sterne and Musil. While the structural jumping around can be a distraction, it drives its point home as effectively as Sartre or Camus on the essential loneliness and isolation of the individual.

Rating:
Summary: The Great Julio's Collage
Review: One thing you won't find in Julio Cortazar's many excellent short stories is anything in the way of biographical data and Cortazar is thus a mysterious figure to his readers who constructs fictions from some marginal unidentifiable place. If you want to know about Cortazar the man you have to research on your own. Born in Belgium(1914) to Argentine parents the family returned to Argentina after WW1 . Julio grew up and attended university and made a living as a translator(Poe and others). Though offered a university position he refused it in protest of the Peron government and thus spent many years teaching grade school(which may explain why so many childrens or naive adult prespectives are employed in his work) then he left for Paris sometime in the fifties. So in Paris he wrote in exile and played trumpet in a Jazz band and lived the life of the boheme until his death in 1984. Hopscotch therefore with its bohemian characters and situations may lead one to assume Horacio is a sort of fictional version of Cortazar. I thought that at first and that was one reason the book was so exciting because I already liked his stories so much. The book is exciting to a point but I think it demands more patience with its methods than some may wish to give it. You can't really compare it to a novel in any conventional sense because there is very little plot and the characters exist only in mere sketch form, we know them only by the ideas they have. This works in Musil, an author mentioned in Hopscotch, but Man Without Quailities is a novel with many dimensions(political, historical, cultural, social)whereas Hopscotch only has one dimension. Since the novel/collage is 564 pages you may find yourself tiring of Horacios thoughts. And I don't think Horacio is a fictional Cortazar. I think Cortazar is writing a modern novel about a hyper modern creature. All of the things lacking in modernism are also lacking in Horacio. I think Cortazar may sympathize with Horacio but he is ultimately using him to show how lost someone can get when he is divorced from all those spheres of activity(political, historical, cultural, social)that modernism ignores. I read Hopscotch now differently than when I first read it. Now I perhaps see better that what is missing from it is a crucial part of it and perhaps such is the art of the collage artist. An art which remains incomplete...free in its unhibited exploration of the exile with no ties, yes, but as Janis Joplin said "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose".

Rating:
Summary: One of the best Novels of the Century
Review: Rayuela was published in 1963 and changed the conception we had about literature. At first just saw as one of the Latin American "Boom" Generation, it soon turned out that, no one around the world a book impacted more on readers and writers. To call it a representative of the boom generation diminishes somewhat its greatness: its's one of the few books that changed the way we approach to literature. It's a book that many a reader will find difficult to follow, but then again, it's not for everyone; just for those who have an open spirit and enjoy excellent literature

Rating:
Summary: the world is a rayuela
Review: rayuela, as is the name in Spanish of this magnificent novel, makes us think about game, the supreme activity to distract the mind and to create, and that is exactly what the author is doing here, playing with the reader, taunting him/her to follow through the galleries of his creative mind, to find amid the pieces the jewel of creation.... LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Hopscotch, a-life-changing-experience, a game-not-a-game
Review: Reviews are often too general and vague, but the ones I've read here are almost as enticing as the actual text. Postmodern perspective, allegorical possibilities, existensialism, alienation factors, intellectual and transcendental qualities, a must-read-book, journeys, games, love, seduction, madness, all these present and pervasive.

Literary collage, that's the function. Cortazar wrote that if he had the means to publish his works, all would be written in this "hopscotch" form. In the words or Morelli, any book could be read in any order, and perhaps by some reader making a mistake of reading chapters in a "wrong" order, the book might become "perfect."

It is a life changing book.

Rating:
Summary: Julio's Here, There, Everywhere
Review: Saying that Hopscotch is "Cortazar's masterpiece...the first great novel of Spanish America" (Times Literary Supplement) is putting it mildly - I would start with a mere "absolute literary classic of all times and spaces". The saga of Horacio Oliveira, the story's protagonist, is delivered as how-I-am-chez-moi and how-I-am-au-dehors, displaying at once the situation endured by many post-WWII Latin Americans who dreamed about changing world (and ended up constructing infinite realities of themselves elsewhere, in nostalgic and melancholic scenarios), while portraying such universal themes of past, present and future on one end, and identity, behaviour, dreams, hopes, illusions... And imagination, on the other. Cortázar's grandiosity, as shown in Hopscotch, is literature's first novel ever written in hypertextual (non-linear) prose (emphasis: this was way before the Internet), wherein the reader, more active than ever, is the very author of the perfect circles with no closure (or a Derridean abyss, if you will), set where conversation and jazz are what you hear, smoke and Buenos Aires are what you smell, liquor and Paris are what you taste, La Maga is what you touch, and dreams and surreality are what you see. In the (non)end, this universal classic is written to be whatever you want it to be - and you can grant it unlimited identities here, there, everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: I can't say anything that hasn't been said before,
Review: so I won't. All I can say is chapter 73 is breathtaking and brilliant. You have to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Rich, Fantastic, enjoyable,.....
Review: Sometimes, a reader has the pleasure and opportunity to read something truly great, something that changes the readers way of thinking permanently. I recently had such an opportunity. Julio Cortazars Hopscotch is a miraculous book bubbling over with allusions, philosophical digressions and, first and foremost, outstanding writing. The book's form is reminiscent of James Joyce, constantly exploring new ways of writing. To recall the mood of this book, imagine the cast of "The Sun also rises", throw in some Beckett absurdisms, metaphysics, Paris in the 50's, a lovestory and some jazz. This is one way of describing Hopscotch. But, the best way of getting to know this mind-changing novel is to order the book, log of the net and start reading. And, when youre done, read it again. And, by the way, this book is even more enjoyable with the accompanyment of either Mingus' "Blues and roots", Coltranes "Blue Train" or Miles' "Kind of Blue". I hope you all will get the same kind of joy out of this book as I did.

Rating:
Summary: Dangerous, ... but wonderful !! (A book with many within...)
Review: Take care with this book... It will reset you, reset your mind, your thoughts, your biliefs. I read it many years ago (15 at least) and from time to time I need to read (in a extremely random way) some of its bitter and sweet pages... If you visit Paris or Buenos Aires, walk through the city pretending you are Horacio or La Maga, pretending deeply, pretending to be the true ... then probably you will be released from the powerful grip of this great book...