[Keene is an American educator and critic. Below, he favorably reviews Hopscotch.]

The publication last year of Julio Cortázar's allegorical novel The Winners earned respectful reviews. Hopscotch, a far more impressive, indeed superb work should establish Cortázar as an outstanding writer of our day.

In general, Hopscotch is the story of Oliveira, an Argentinian writer living in Paris with La Maga, his mistress, and her child by another man. He falsely suspects she is deceiving him with a friend. After the death of La Maga's child, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires, working first as a salesman, later as the keeper of a circus cat, finally as an attendant in an insane asylum.

It is difficult to describe the plot of Hopscotch, not because it is confused or vague—on the contrary, it is continuously absorbing even on the most obvious level—but because the author, whether with the voice of Oliveira, the principal character, or Morelli, a dying writer whose notebooks figure prominently at the end, seems to forbid any conventional plot summary.

We are told: "In some place Morelli tried to justify his narrative incoherencies, maintaining that the life of others, such as it comes to us in so-called reality, is not a movie but still photography, that is to say, that we cannot grasp the action, only a few of its elastically recorded fragments…. For that reason there was nothing strange about his speaking of characters in the most spasmodic way possible; giving coherence to the series of pictures so they could become a movie (which would have been so very pleasing to the reader he called the female-reader) meant filling in with literature, presumptions, hypotheses, and inventions the gaps between one and another photograph." Again, a character remarks of Morelli: "For example, the Chinese-scroll novel makes him explode. The book read from beginning to end like a good child."

The story, despite the deliberately episodic, snapshot manner, achieves dramatic intensity. The dialogue is brilliant, whether the subject is literature, love, Mondrian, jazz or the fallibility of science. Individual scenes are superbly alive. One evening, Oliveira, sure that La Maga is making love with another man, ducks into a piano recital to get out of the rain. The audience of 20 dwindles as each successively more disastrous piece is played, ending with a "Délibes-Saint-Saëns Synthesis" that leaves only Oliveira. He decides to see home the pianist, a grotesque old woman living on imaginary triumphs. After their harrowingly comic walk he returns to his apartment. Friends drift in and they converse volubly, brilliantly, everyone aware, except for La Maga, that her child has just died in the same room. The scene is a triumph not only of dramatic structure but of comic invention.

The "table of instructions" preceding the novel informs us that it may be read in at least two ways: the first is in the normal manner, to the end of Chapter 56, about two-thirds of the way through the book. The hundred "expendable chapters" appended at this point provide a second reading when inserted among the original 56 chapters in a prescribed order. "Hopscotch" not only stands up to this double scrutiny but becomes immeasurably richer; no doubt other readings would yield even further meanings.

The "expendable chapters" consist in part of narrative amplifying the incidents of the book, but more commonly of discourse on the art of fiction or of images (often in the form of newspaper articles or quotations) which invite the reader to participate in the experience of creating the book and to become the "accomplice or traveling companion" of the author.

At the end of our first reading Oliveira is teetering on a windowsill between life and death, sanity and insanity. When we read the book a second time, hopping back and forth from early chapters to late ones, as in the game of hopscotch, we go beyond the last numbered square of the hopscotch to the "heaven" at the top: Oliveira, recuperating at home from his plunge from the windowsill, ironically discusses the possibility of joining the "national corporation of monks of the prayers of the sign of the cross."

Hopscotch is in fact a comic novel, sometimes howlingly funny, always acutely ironic. Morelli writes: "The comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount him astride any 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." Cortázar's intense concern with the novel certainly entails no dullness; the rapid-fire invention of the language makes every page sparkle, thanks to the translation by Gregory Rabassa, which gives a dazzling parallel in American idiom to Cortázar's stylistic magic.

Cortázar himself is an Argentinian, and no doubt many will be tempted to see in Oliveira a portrait of the author, or even of the cultured Argentinian as an expatriate both in Paris and in his own country. But Cortázar warns us in an epigraph from the surrealist poet Jacques Vaché: "Nothing kills a man like being obliged to represent a country." Hopscotch is not intended to be a treatment of a problem—whether the alienation of the South American intellectual or any other—but rather an attempt to "place a reader—a certain reader, that is true—in contact with a personal world, with a personal existence and mediation."

It is true nevertheless that the writer's nationality gives a particular coloration to the book, not merely in its mentions of people sipping maté or the savage humor directed at literary tastes in Argentina, but negatively too, in the extraordinary catholicity of learning possible only in an author whose concern for national literary traditions does not obscure a more general concern for man. It is precisely because the gauchos of the pampas and the other literary baggage of South American particularism are absent from this novel that Cortázar transcends our immense ignorance of his country to move us and make us his companions.