The novel revolves around the life experiences of Horacio Olivera, an Argentinian intellectual. But this experimental work breaks any rules and provokes our thought, leaving us often perplexed while facing not only the lack of a set structure, but also the numerous academic quotations and references, the protagonist’s philosophical reflections, and his convoluted reasoning. Regardless of the way one decides to approach the novel, the plot in itself is not complicated and the episodes are ultimately intertwined and connected. Cortazar believes, in the words of Morelli (an important character in the novel, a writer and literary critic that can be seen as the author’s alter ego), that the reader could become an ‘accomplice’ and a ‘travel companion, ‘ …able to become a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and in the same form.’ It can be read in different ways, either progressively or ‘hopscotching’ through the 56 chapters and the following third section, according to the instructions given by the author who, in any case, lets the reader decide and therefore ‘react’ to it. ‘Hopscotch’ is a demanding and technically refined work, written with a great care for language and without an apparent regular structure. I have reflected quite a lot upon this book, coming back to it only when I felt fully ready to appreciate what this reading experience had left me. Our first encounter during this recent book-club journey – as I like to call it, being an exploration into quite unknown territory that left us richer and wiser, as any journey should be – started with probably the most complex novel of the three: ‘ Rayuela’ (1963), known in English as ‘ Hoptscotch’, and written by the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar. Thanks to the richness of these new and powerful literary expressions, Latin-American literature crossed its boundaries and became well-known worldwide. Regarding the themes – despite the economic expansion – injustice, political turmoil, dictatorships, poverty, disillusion towards the ruling class and the subsequent alienation were often and unavoidably part of these writers’ works.
The different Latin American literatures (we should use the plural, as there is not only one) saw a flourishing period in the Sixties: the authors experimented in terms of genres, language and form, also influenced by great writers like Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf. The experience took us first to Argentina with Cortázar(‘Rayuela’/Hopscotch, 1963), then Peru with Vargas Llosa (‘La casa verde’/ The Green House, 1966) and Colombia with Márquez (‘Cien Años de Soledad’/ One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). We’ve been recently ‘travelling’ through some areas of Latin America during our literary journey, thanks to the three book-club sessions held by Ciriaco Offeddu in March.
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