Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Published 1963 · 389 pages · 186,889 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction

How hard is Hopscotch to read?

Hopscotch scores 70 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
Mix of colloquial and intellectual registers. Jazz terminology, philosophical vocabulary, porteño slang.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
Variable styles across chapters—some conventionally narrative, others experimental. Stream of consciousness passages.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
Extended discussions of aesthetics, authenticity, the limitations of language. The Club's conversations are deliberately philosophical.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Dense with cultural reference but the episodic structure provides breathing room.
Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
Non-linear structure, "expendable" chapters that recontextualize others, multiple possible reading orders.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
The hopscotch itself, the bridge, the circus—symbols present but the novel is more philosophical than symbolic.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Cortázar both indulges and ironizes bohemian pretension. Affectionate mockery throughout.
Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
Multiple possible endings depending on reading order. Oliveira's fate deliberately ambiguous.
Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
The reading-order choice creates meta-structural complexity. 155 chapters, 99 "expendable."

How Hopscotch is regarded

Hopscotch holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What Hopscotch asks you to hold together

Hopscotch sustains Systematic (12) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a constellation. It peaks at Metasystematic (13), constellations compared on pages 360–362. Read from the full text, all 370 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Hopscotch sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (370 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Hopscotch scores 86 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
And since I’m by no stretch a hero, I think I’d better stay
Symbol: Mythical (Archetypal), with Anagogic pressure
Heaven was nothing but a childish name for his kibbutz
Mythos: Irony and Satire IV (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
La Maga shrieked and rolled onto the bed, face down then on her back then on her side
Genre: Anatomy + Novel + Confession
(Collections: example: an archive keeps files in a collection; a cemetery keeps corpses in a collection; a jail keeps prisoners in a collection, etc.)

Where the story of Hopscotch takes place

  • Paris, Left Bank, late 1950s (Serpent Club, Rue du Sommerard) (1958 to 1960), the main setting
  • Buenos Aires: Calle Cachimayo, the circus and the Calle Trelles clinic, c. 1960 (1960 to 1961)

5 things that are true of Hopscotch, with the passage for each

  1. The book opens by saying it can be read straight through to Chapter 56, or by starting at Chapter 73 and following a printed sequence.

    The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then

  2. Wong carries a series of eight photographs of a Chinese execution by dismemberment and shows it to Oliveira at a Club session.

    it was the same post repeated eight times in four series of two photos each

  3. Rocamadour dies while the Club members sit around the lamp debating reality; La Maga finds out when she tries to give him his medicine.

    La Maga shrieked and rolled onto the bed, face down then on her back then on her side

  4. In Buenos Aires Traveler and Talita build a bridge of planks between their window and Oliveira's, and Talita crawls out on it to hand over mate.

    Traveler reappeared soon, dragging an enormous plank, which he shoved little by little out of the window.

  5. The last scene leaves Oliveira at an open window above the hopscotch, tempted to lean out and let go; the narration does not say whether he jumps.

    lean over just a little bit farther out and let himself go, paff the end

Scenes in Hopscotch that Frye would name

49 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
La Maga shrieked and rolled onto the bed, face down then on her back then on her side Rocamadour's death is revealed to La Maga by the spilled medicine.
Sparagmos, untitled
the prisoner appeared as a blackish mass on which one could make out an open mouth and a very white arm Wong's photographs of a lingering execution are literal dismemberment shown to the Club.
Pathos, untitled
it was a great effort to bring himself to feel Rocamadour’s tiny stomach, the cold thighs Oliveira discovers the dead child in the dark while the others chatter and drink.
Katabasis, untitled
He was in his little, comfortable, refrigerated Hades, but there was no Eurydice to look for Oliveira and Talita go down to the basement morgue, a refrigerated Hades.
Katabasis, untitled
now he was at the edge of the pit, the hole of Eleusis, the clinic wrapped in sulphurous vapors, the descent The freight-elevator shaft is explicitly named as the descent into the underworld.
Agon, untitled
“Alone in the center of the ring like two men.” Oliveira and Traveler face off across threads and basins in the clinic dawn: the ritual combat of doubles.

Books that share these scenes with Hopscotch

About the author

Julio Cortázar

Simon's essay on this book