Hopscotch: A Novel (Rayuela)
Julio Cortazar, Gregory Rabassa (translation)
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 & La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures & intellectual acrobatics, & 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, & an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless & relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris & Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.
Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, & his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism & the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz & New Wave Cinema.
Hopscotch is a stream-of-consciousness novel which can be read according to two different sequences of chapters. This novel is often referred to as a counter-novel, as it was by Cortázar himself. It meant an exploration with multiple endings, a neverending search through unanswerable questions. Written in Paris, it was published in Spanish in 1963 & in English in 1966.
In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recom