Reading Order
Hopscotch Reading Order
Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) by Julio Cortázar is the most formally radical novel of the Latin American Boom and one of the defining works of experimental fiction — a novel that comes with a 'Table of Instructions' giving two possible reading orders: the 'passive' reader can read chapters 1–56 in order and stop; the 'active' reader should read the chapters in a prescribed alternating sequence (73, 1, 2, 116, 3, 84, 4, 71, 5...) that interleaves the main narrative chapters with 'expendable chapters' of philosophical fragments, literary criticism, jokes, music commentary, and extended discussions between the characters about the nature of art, reality, and the failure of Western civilization's rational categories. The novel's title refers to the children's game of hopscotch — a sequential game with a clear path to 'heaven' — which Cortázar uses as an image for the linear, destination-oriented mode of reading and being that he is trying to subvert. The novel follows Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual living in Paris with his lover La Maga (an intuitive, non-intellectual woman whose relationship to reality he both envies and cannot share), through a crisis — the death of La Maga's baby, the dissolution of their relationship, Oliveira's return to Buenos Aires — that is simultaneously a love story, a philosophical crisis, and an investigation into the inadequacy of the intellectual's relationship to immediate experience. Cortázar's argument, developed through Oliveira's restless, self-defeating intelligence, is that the Western rational tradition has cut us off from a more direct, instinctive engagement with reality — that we cannot dance because we know too much theory of dancing, cannot love because we cannot stop analyzing love. Hopscotch is both a demonstration of this problem (its reader cannot simply experience the novel; they are forced to think about how they are reading it) and an attempt to find a way through it.
Where to start
Hopscotch — the Gregory Rabassa translation is the classic English version; Rabassa won the National Book Award for it. Read the instructions: try the first 56 chapters in order on a first reading, then the full prescribed sequence on a second.
Complete Hopscotch Book List
- 1Buy
Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)
Julio Cortázar·1966·Rabassa's National Book Award-winning translation — the standard English version; preserves Cortázar's tonal range from philosophical to comic. - 2Buy
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges·1944·Borges's story collection — the philosophical companion to Hopscotch; Borges creates labyrinths in concentrated form, Cortázar extends them to novel length. - 3Buy
If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino·1979·Calvino's metafictional novel — Hopscotch's Italian counterpart; the most explicit development of the active-reader concept in European fiction. - 4Buy
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo·1955·Rulfo's Mexican novel — the other founding text of Latin American experimental fiction; where Cortázar is exuberant and playful, Rulfo is minimal and devastating. - 5Buy
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez·1967·García Márquez's masterpiece — the novel that defined the Latin American Boom; written four years after Hopscotch, in dialogue with it throughout. - 6Buy
Blow-Up and Other Stories
Julio Cortázar·1967·Cortázar's short story collection — the basis for Antonioni's 1966 film; shows his range in the shorter form; easier entry to his voice than Hopscotch. - 7Buy
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass·1959·Grass's German Boom novel — published four years before Hopscotch; a narrator who refuses to grow up telling the history of Nazi Germany; the comparable European experiment in the same period. - 8Buy
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne·1759·Sterne's eighteenth-century comic novel — the formal ancestor of Hopscotch; the novel that most thoroughly disrupted linear narrative before the twentieth century.
Hopscotch — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hopscotch and how should it be read?
Hopscotch is a novel by Julio Cortázar that comes with a 'Table of Instructions' offering two reading paths. The 'passive' reader reads chapters 1–56 in order and has a complete (if conventional) reading experience. The 'active' reader follows a prescribed sequence of 155 chapters that alternates the main narrative chapters with 'expendable chapters' of philosophical fragments, literary criticism, jokes, and extended discussions. The prescribed sequence is: 73, 1, 2, 116, 3, 84, 4, 71, 5, 81... (the full sequence is listed in the Table of Instructions). This produces a different, more fragmented, more philosophically engaged reading experience. Cortázar intends both readings to be valid; many readers do the sequential reading first and the prescribed sequence second.
Who is La Maga and what is her significance in Hopscotch?
La Maga (Lucia) is Horacio Oliveira's Uruguayan lover in Paris — an intuitive, non-intellectual woman who has a direct, instinctive relationship to experience that Oliveira lacks and envies. She has a baby (Rocamadour) who dies during the novel; she disappears after the dissolution of her relationship with Oliveira. La Maga's significance is philosophical: she represents everything Oliveira's intellectual culture has lost — the capacity to simply be in the world rather than analyze it, to experience music and love and suffering directly rather than through the mediating categories of Western rational thought. Oliveira loves her, is incapable of truly reaching her, and destroys his relationship with her through the same intellectual self-consciousness that makes him unable to reach any direct experience. She is both a character and an image of the immediate, unanalyzed life that the novel's formal experiments are trying to recover.
What is the novel's argument about Western rationalism?
Hopscotch is a sustained argument that the Western rational tradition — the culture of analysis, categorization, logical thinking, and deferred gratification — has created a fundamental disconnection between intellectual people and immediate experience. Oliveira cannot dance because he knows too much about dancing; cannot love because he cannot stop analyzing love; cannot experience music directly because he always hears it through the mediation of theory and history. The novel proposes that there must be another way of being — which it calls, somewhat tentatively, the 'kibbutz of desire' or simply 'the other side' — that would recover the directness La Maga has naturally. Cortázar doesn't claim to have found this alternative; Hopscotch is the search for it, not the answer. But the formal experiment of the novel itself — forcing the reader to think about how they are reading rather than simply reading — is a way of making the reader experience the problem rather than simply read about it.
What is the relationship between Hopscotch and the Latin American Boom?
The Latin American Boom was a period (roughly 1960–1975) in which Latin American fiction achieved international recognition, with works by Cortázar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and José Donoso all appearing within a few years of each other. Hopscotch (1963) was the first major Boom novel and in some ways the most radical — it established the formal ambition, the willingness to experiment, and the intellectual seriousness that characterized the Boom at its best. García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) was partly written in response to it; Vargas Llosa and Fuentes were both deeply influenced by it. The Boom was not a school or movement with a shared aesthetic — Cortázar is nothing like Rulfo, Borges is nothing like García Márquez — but Hopscotch demonstrated that Latin American fiction could compete on equal terms with the European avant-garde and exceed it.
What should I read after Hopscotch?
After Hopscotch, Cortázar's short story collections — Blow-Up and Other Stories (1967), A Manual for Manuel (1973) — show his range in shorter forms. Borges's Ficciones and The Aleph are the philosophical companions. For the Latin American Boom context, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) show the other major registers of the movement. For formal experiments comparable to Hopscotch's in other literary traditions, Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) are the most important.
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