A review by towercity
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

4.0

One of the first "high lit" books I ever read, during my senior year of high school between Harry Potter and Abarat. It was well above my head then, couched in references I had no chance of understanding at the time, but I marvelled at every page, flipping through some difficult passages, reading others more than twice. Perhaps because of the difficult I had with reading it, it became a sort of magical object. I could not read it like a normal book, physically or intellectually, but I could not stop reading it. There are lines in Chapter 23 which, reading through a second time more recently, I could still recall word for word. (This is 5 years later.) If anything, there is magic in that.

Some of the magic must be attributed to how the book is read: the reader can choose to read the book in order or to skip around chapters in an path lightly prescribed by the author (which, given that half the book remains unread if this path is foregone, most choose the hopscotching path). This adds an additional difficulty to the book. The reader must search through the novel to find each new chapter. And the novel itself is about searching, constant and numerous searches. Thus the reader consciously, physically enacts the novel by reading it. It creates a bond between the reader and the read which feels entirely magical.

"Everything depends on … (a sentence scratched out)." -- Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch