I finally finished Hopscotch. it was a very sad thing, closing this novel and finding a home for it on the shelf. the distance between Cortazar’s world and mine grew so much in those few paces i made to the wall. it was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences i’ve ever had. the stream-of-consciousness, prose, and humor are vibrant and engaging.

i especially love Cortazar’s humor- lots of deadpan stuff, absurdity, and situational comedy that i really enjoy reading. in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces or Dr. Strangelove. one of my favorite scenes begins with Horacio booby-trapping his room to defend himself from an irate friend. as his friend stumbles through a hatchwork of thread in the dark and steps in pans full of water, Horacio is leaning out the window, narrating the events to someone outside in this blase sort of way: “oh, he’s soaked his slipper now. he must be really mad.” the scene would be difficult to write, there is rapid perspective changes, and a lot of it is so cinematic in tone… but of course Cortazar makes it work and it’s funny as hell.

also, Hopscotch holds a special place in my heart because Cortazar shoots the moon using an experimental format, which is so uncommon. Reading experimental fiction often feels like looking at people’s haircuts in an old class yearbook. very few survive the cruel assessment of hindsight. as opposed to going the linear route, i read the book in the hopscotch style recommended by Cortazar, and felt myself profoundly altered by the experience. Otherwise expendable chapters are folded into the narrative by reading the book this way, to very unique effect. sometimes the latter chapters that you jump to are little snippets from a newspaper, a science journal or another writer’s work, which gives it a little bit of a temporal context, and also allows the reader to truly step out of the narrative. it’s kind of like the relationship between a poem and its epigram. sometimes they’re word games, jokes or quotations that expand on something that’s going on in the novel at the time, bridge two different plot points together, or really drive home a philosophical point that may have the reader’s eyebrow slanted.

simply put, the hopscotch reading style imitates the flow of time. by reading the novel this way, you can never tell how much of the book you have left, and you can’t go backwards without a lot of trouble. i think our recognition of this would make Cortazar smile. a seriously gifted prose stylist, brilliant man, and worth reading above anything else you have stacked by your bed.

p.s. i feel a certain kinship with Cortazar. Hopscotch ignores literary conventions altogether, and would be the novel i would want to write, if i ever tried. i love how the entire thing feels like a collage that you’re encouraged to look at any way you choose. i love how two paragraphs about the way depression feels and how it randomly goes away is nestled between some anecdote about Parisian chalk artists as an “eschatological pattern” and a newspaper clipping from the London Times about a health epidemic. why not? more writers should be so daring. the outdated newspaper story is irrelevant, but so is most of your life. and by placing it into a novel, it makes it feel like something that i live every day, warts and all.