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3.5 

Hopscotch

By Julio Cortázar
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

"Cortazar's masterpiece ... The first great novel of Spanish America" (The Times Literary Supplement) Winner of the National Book Award for Translation in 1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa

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 which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

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Hopscotch Reviews

3.5
“first read through from chapters 1 to 56 as it suggests. though it didn’t blow me out of the water i would consider another read through in the second order that it suggest, maybe in a year.”
“It’s rare you experience a book which sometimes has the best prose and the best lines of thinking you’ve seen in fiction (for a long time) and then reverting immediately back to being a pretentious, alienating slog. Really mixed feelings but I think a 3.5/5 is how I’m feeling (rounded to 4 here). Also: I can tell that this was meant to be read in Spanish - sometimes the alienating prose feels just like weird translation. So I don’t entirely blame the author for my view on this book. Things I did very much like: - Various (though mainly Oliveira’s) monologues re: identities and their formation (the ‘I’), music (jazz especially), and the more metaphysics-oriented passages that spring from a clearly erudite, well-read Cortázar (Kant being the philosopher I think who is mentioned most, but I’m not sure that’s who I associated many of the philo-tangents with) - A lot of the back-and-forth between Traveler and Oliveira is very funny - The prose is incredible when Oliveira’s out and about by himself, and it’s in his isolation that he is at his best; he’s an awful person otherwise”

About Julio Cortázar

JULIO CORTÁZAR was born in Brussels to Argentinian parents in 1914, was raised in Argentina, and in 1952 moved to Paris, where he continued to live for the rest of his life. He was a poet, translator, an amateur jazz musician as well as the author of several novels and volumes of short stories. Ten of his books have been published in English: The Winners, Hopscotch (which won the National Book Award), Blow-Up and Other Stories, Cronopios and Famas, 62: A Model Kit, A Change of Light, We Love Glenda So Much, and A Certain Lucas. He received the Prix Médicis Award (France, 1974) and the Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence (Nicaragua, 1983), among other accolades. Considered one of the great modern Latin American authors, he died in Paris in February 1984.

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