The story opens with Horacio searching the bridges of Paris for his lover, a Uruguyan woman named Lucia (better known throughout the novel as la Maga), who has disappeared. The story progresses in a non-linear order. The other characters consist of La Maga and a band of bohemian intellectuals who call themselves the Serpent Club. He experiences life in Paris in the 1950s. The first 36 chapters of the novel in numerical order are grouped under the heading 'From the Other Side.' They provide an account of the life of Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual. Traditional spelling and grammatical rules are often bent and sometimes broken outright.

Several narrative techniques are employed throughout the book, and frequently overlap, including first person, third person, and a kind of stream-of-consciousness. Cortázar also leaves the reader the option of choosing a unique path through the narrative. Chapter 55 is left out all together in this second method, and the book would end with a recursive loop, as the reader is potentially left to 'hopscotch' back and forth between chapters 58 and 131 infinitely. Some of the 'expendable' chapters at first seem like random musings, but upon closer inspection solve questions that arise during the reading of the first two parts of the book.Īn author's note suggests that the book would best be read in one of two possible ways: either progressively from chapters 1 to 56, with all subsequent 'expendable chapters' being excluded, or by 'hopscotching' through the entire set of 155 chapters according to a 'Table of Instructions' designated by the author. Written in an episodic, snapshot manner, the novel has 155 chapters, the last 99 designated as 'expendable.' Some of these 'expendable' chapters fill in gaps that occur in the main storyline, while others add information about the characters or record the aesthetic or literary speculations of a writer named Morelli who makes a brief appearance in the narrative. It meant an exploration with multiple endings, a neverending search through unanswerable questions.

This novel is often referred to as a counter-novel, as it was by Cortázar himself. Hopscotch is a stream-of-consciousness novel which can be read according to two different sequences of chapters.

edition, translator Gregory Rabassa split the inaugural National Book Award in the translation category. Written in Paris, it was published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966. Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.

62 by Julio Cortázar