Hopscotch
SynopsisPlot
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat that can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
Story
About this book
Hopscotch, originally published in Spanish as Rayuela in 1963, is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. It follows Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual living in Paris with his lover, La Maga, and a circle of bohemian friends who gather as a group they call the Club. Their days are filled with conversation, music, and aimless philosophy until a child's death and La Maga's disappearance fracture the group and push Oliveira back to Buenos Aires.
In Argentina, Oliveira drifts through a series of odd jobs: selling fabric, tending a circus cat reportedly able to count, and working as an attendant in a psychiatric institution. The novel tracks his restless movement between two cities and two versions of himself, one defined by abstraction and the other by the ordinary strangeness of daily life.
The book contains 155 chapters and was designed to be read in more than one order. Cortázar provided a suggested alternate sequence that rearranges the chapters and incorporates sections marked as expendable. He described the work not as an anti-novel but as a counter-novel. It was written in Paris and first published on 28 June 1963.
