A Manual for Manuel was awarded the Prix Medicis. One critic has called it a necessary second volume for Hopscotch. The narrative structure of A Manual for Manuel, although less complex than that of Hopscotch, is experimental and similar to the structure used by twentieth century musicians, both classical and jazz. It proceeds in a more or less linear way, but there are certain questions left unanswered, certain unfilled gaps, because of the way in which the story is told. There is no omnipresent narrator. Rather, the story is told primarily through the eyes of a narrator, “the one I told you,” and Andres. The fact that the modernist cannot get inside the historical event, rendering modernist literature helpless as a political educational tool, is of concern to Cortázar. His novel is about this problem, making the work post-modernist in that it examines the structure of the modernist novel.

Philosophically, Cortázar’s refusal of the role of omniscient narrator who would have access to the thing itself implies that there is no essence to be distinguished from appearance. Two possible conclusions arise: He is a Kantian, who believes that the object is unknowable, or he is a post-modernist, who refuses to distinguish between art and its object. The implication of this method is that reality becomes intelligible through the combined activity of the writer and reader who write or read the text. In A Manual for Manuel, “the one I told you” sees the kidnapping as “a multilenticular and quadrichromatic picture of the ants and the Vip himself. . . .” This “multilenticular” view joins the imaginings of “the one I told you” with the “sparser” information possessed by Marcos and Ludmilla. The active reader of the book must then take all this and attempt to reconstruct the event.

In terms of genre, Cortázar’s work has been linked to the literature of fantasy and Magical Realism, both by critics and in his own writing. Yet he sees his activity as a writer and the active participation that he demands on the part of the reader as a form of political practice that transcends the boundaries of traditional genres to become a testimony of Latin American reality. Certain critics have interpreted the freedom embodied in characters such as La Maga as a model for overcoming alienation and shaking epistemological assumptions. Cortázar sees the “Other,” the dimension of the fantastic, as our only salvation from conforming to the role of obedient robots that the technocrats would like us to accept and which we continue to refuse. In his own life, the political form of Cortázar’s refusal can be seen in his support for the Cuban revolution, Allende’s regime, the Russell Tribunal, and the Nicaraguan revolution.

A Manual for Manuel marked a turning point in Cortázar’s career, toward political literature. Not all critics greeted this change favorably, and many still believe that Hopscotch is a more successful literary work.