Hopscotch

Hopscotch follows Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual adrift in Paris among a loose group of artists and expatriates who call themselves the Club, then back in Buenos Aires where he works odd jobs and slides toward breakdown. At the center is his love for La Maga, a woman who feels life directly in a way his endless theorizing never lets him. The book offers two ways to read it. One path runs straight through the first 56 chapters. The other hops across the full set in a sequence Cortazar provides, weaving in dozens of "expendable" chapters of quotes, fragments, and asides. The structure makes the reader a collaborator and turns the novel into a board to be played.