Indeed, his obsessions begin to have dire psychological and real-life consequences: He falls in with an old friend, Traveler, and his wife, Talita, in whom he comes to see first remembrances and, then, the reincarnation of his lost love. In the second section, “From This Side,” Oliveira has returned to Buenos Aires, by way of deportation, and has taken up residence with a former girlfriend, Gekrepten, though he is no closer to resolving his grief over the loss of La Maga.
Haunted by time and memory, and by his own failings, Oliveira is unable to reconcile the pieces of his past and present into a unified whole.
He spends much of his time with his circle of friends, known as the Snake Club- intellectuals, failed artists, and discontents like himself, with strong appetites for jazz, art, metaphysics, and self-indulgence-though his engagement with them offers him little clarity or peace. As the novel opens, Oliveira is shown for the lost soul he has become: drifting through the streets of Paris, searching in vain for a sight of La Maga, tortured by his memory of her. with a clean conscience.” The protagonist of Hopscotch is the bohemian Horacio Oliveira, a writer and Argentinean expatriate living in Paris, heartsick over the dissolution of his relationship with his estranged lover, the beautiful La Maga. In the first reading, the book is divided into two main sections, “From the Other Side” and “From This Side,” with a third, “From Diverse Sides,” that the author claims the reader “may ignore. Though this type of structural, and thus narrative, conceit is perhaps more readily digested by 21st-century readers, having been familiarized with the postmodern literary experiments of the 1960s and beyond, to the public that initially received Hopscotch it was an outrageous risk that earned both the book and its author immediate international fame and infamy. Hopscotch is thus two novels-and perhaps many more-in one, the first to be read straight through, in the traditional, linear fashion and the second emerging by reading the chapters out of sequence, according to the author’s instruction.
The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73.” The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56. Referring to it as a single novel, however, is misleading, as Cortázar (1914–84) himself explains via an audacious “Table of Instructions” that precedes the opening chapter: “In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. Hopscotch is not only Julio Cortázar’s most celebrated literary achievement, it stands alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the most important and influential novels of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s.
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