Recommendations
Books Like Hopscotch
Best books to read after Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Hopscotch is the most formally radical novel in the Latin American tradition — a love story and a philosophical novel that can be read in two different orders and that requires the reader to participate in its construction. If the novel's formal audacity and its portrait of bohemian Paris and Buenos Aires moved you, these books share its concern with the active reader, its interest in authentic existence as something that must be constructed rather than received, and its conviction that the novel's form can be as philosophically serious as its content.
- 1Buy
Blow-Up and Other Stories
by Julio Cortázar
The essential companion — Cortázar's story collection including 'Blow-Up' (the basis of Antonioni's film), 'Axolotl,' 'The Pursuer'; where Hopscotch is Cortázar at full scale, these stories show his mastery of compression and his ability to inhabit a fantastic premise with complete conviction
- 2Buy
Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
The essential companion in the Argentine tradition — Borges's seventeen stories organized as fictional documents; Borges and Cortázar define the two poles of Argentine literary genius: Borges's compression and formal precision, Cortázar's expansion and formal radicalism; reading both gives the full picture of what Argentine fiction achieved in the twentieth century
- 3Buy
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The companion in the Latin American Boom — García Márquez's magical-realist family saga; Cortázar and García Márquez are the two most influential figures of the Latin American Boom and their approaches are completely different: Cortázar's formal radicalism versus García Márquez's narrative sweep; reading both gives the full range of what the Boom achieved
- 4Buy
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Burroughs's novel that announces it can be read beginning at any chapter — the American parallel to Hopscotch's formal radicalism in its rejection of conventional narrative sequence; Hopscotch and Naked Lunch are the two most formally radical novels of the early 1960s in their different traditions, and the comparison illuminates what each is attempting
- 5Buy
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Joyce's modernist masterpiece — the essential predecessor to the formal radicalism Cortázar practices in Hopscotch; Cortázar's Paris bohemian world in the 1950s is shaped by the same literary culture that produced Joyce, and Hopscotch can be understood as a Latin American attempt to do something as formally revolutionary as Ulysses in the context of the 1960s
- 6Buy
If on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
Calvino's novel that addresses the reader directly — the most important European parallel to Hopscotch in the tradition of the novel that foregrounds its own construction; where Hopscotch gives the reader two reading paths through its chapters, Calvino's novel gives the reader a series of novel beginnings that are all interrupted before completion
- 7Buy
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
The essential companion from the Latin American tradition — Allende's family saga blending magical realism with political history; where Hopscotch is organized around bohemian intellectual life and formal experimentation, The House of the Spirits is organized around family and political history; together they show the range of what Latin American fiction did with magic and reality in the 1960s–1980s
- 8Buy
Conversation in the Cathedral
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa's most formally ambitious novel — the four-hour conversation that unspools twenty years of Lima history; the comparison in the Latin American Boom tradition of formal ambition: where Cortázar experiments with reading order, Vargas Llosa experiments with temporal structure; both demand an active reader who constructs the story from its components
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