Rayuela Reading Order

Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) by Julio Cortázar is the novel that liberated Latin American fiction from its obligations to realism and announced the Boom as a formal as well as political revolution. The novel comes with a 'Table of Instructions' that invites readers to read it in one of two ways: straight through (chapters 1–56), or in the order Cortázar prescribes, which includes a third section of 'expendable chapters' interspersed among the main narrative in a prescribed sequence that turns the novel into a game, a Hopscotch board, a labyrinth. Horacio Oliveira is an Argentine intellectual living in Paris with La Maga, a Uruguayan woman of natural, unselfconscious being that Oliveira's relentless intellectualism prevents him from reaching; after her child Rocamadour dies, Oliveira drifts back to Buenos Aires. The novel's formal ambition is inseparable from its philosophical content: Cortázar is interrogating the nature of fiction, the nature of reading, and the possibility of a mode of being that transcends the Western intellectual's imprisonment in language and analysis. The Paris section's Club of the Serpent — a group of intellectuals who listen to jazz, discuss philosophy, and do nothing — is one of the great satirical portraits of intellectual life in twentieth-century fiction. The Buenos Aires section's Traveler and Talita (doubles of Oliveira and La Maga) and the madhouse where Oliveira works give the novel its most uncanny sequences. Hopscotch was the decisive influence on the Latin American boom: it showed that Spanish could do what French and English experimental fiction could do, and that Latin America could produce a fully international avant-garde.