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sarahreadsaverylot 's review for:
Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
"Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it's very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get knack of how to jump over the different squares...and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven...the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden an you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too..."
But what does that have to do with the story?
Perhaps Morelli says it best...
"Situation of the reader. In general every novelist hopes his reader will understand him, by participating in his own experience, or that he will pick up a determined message and incorporate it. The romantic novelist wants to be understood for his own sake or for that of his heroes; the classical novelist want to teach, leave his trace on the path of history. A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader's time and substitute author's time. Thus the reader would be able to become a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novel is passing, at the same moment and in the same form...In this sense the comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount him astride an emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype, with traces of something that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual. Better yet, give him something like a facade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the co-suffering)."
South American meta-fiction blended with Parisian ennui and seasoned with existential angst and expat misery. Not to be taken lightly.
But what does that have to do with the story?
Perhaps Morelli says it best...
"Situation of the reader. In general every novelist hopes his reader will understand him, by participating in his own experience, or that he will pick up a determined message and incorporate it. The romantic novelist wants to be understood for his own sake or for that of his heroes; the classical novelist want to teach, leave his trace on the path of history. A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader's time and substitute author's time. Thus the reader would be able to become a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novel is passing, at the same moment and in the same form...In this sense the comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount him astride an emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype, with traces of something that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual. Better yet, give him something like a facade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the co-suffering)."
South American meta-fiction blended with Parisian ennui and seasoned with existential angst and expat misery. Not to be taken lightly.