Hopscotch New York: Pantheon Books, 1966
Julio Cortázar (translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa)
I bought a copy of this a few years ago, and I'm not sure what made me start reading it this year. It's a self-consciously labyrinthine and ludic novel, following the anti-hero Oliveira's affairs and bohemian existence from Paris to Buenos Aires, and although I enjoyed it, and found myself being seduced, almost against my will, into its games with structure, I was a bit relieved when it was over.
The book is divided into three sections - "From the other side", "From this side", and "From diverse sides (expendable chapters)" and a prefatory note tells the reader that it can be read linearly up to chapter 56, ignoring the expendable section, or in a non-linear way, hopping between the expressionist fragments of the character's lives and the expendable chapters, which are largely short intertexts from other writers or disquisitions on the theories of the novel or anti-novel of a writer, Morelli, who is also featured in the Parisian sections.
It's saved from being a metafictional game by the seriousness of the stakes: the refusal to settle into a comfortable fictional form echoes Oliveira's refusal of anything like a regular existence, and the philosophical and literary arguments of his circle in Paris are driven by a genuine sense of anguish.
What spoilt it for me was the misogyny, which goes well past mere machismo to an aggressive identification of the feminine with stupidity and the complacent attitude of "the female-reader" (who would, one gathers, have less patience for fictions which spend so much of their time wanking). And, I have to admit, the novel's manic nihilism got to me in a sore spot: it reminded me painfully of my own struggles with feelings of meaninglessness and thwarted intellectual ambition.
Sometimes one reads a book and thinks, if only I'd read this earlier, but I'm glad that I didn't read Hopscotch when I was an angry young man. It would have been a bad influence.