Hopscotch

Oliveira wants certainty. Living in Paris, he gets jazz, love and beautiful disorder. Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, the forerunner of the Latin Boom in the 1960s, is published in Vintage Classics for the first time. Dazed by the disappearance of his muse, Argentinian writer Horatio Oliveira wanders the bridges of Paris while jazz, literature, life and art echo around him. A chance encounter with a literary idol and his new work, a novel that can be read in random order, sends Horatio’s mind into further confusion. As a return to Buenos Aires beckons, Horatio’s friend and fellow artist, Traveler, awaits his arrival with dread. Their lives are ready to play out in an inexhaustible game of indeterminacy. Hopscotch is a landmark Latin American literary novel about art, exile, love, form and uncertainty. Experimental, restless and intellectually alive, it remains one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction. 'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply understood moments in life itself, rich with many kinds of potential meanings and intimations' Times Literary Supplement