Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

Overview

"Cortazar's masterpiece ... The first great novel of Spanish America" (The Times Literary Supplement) • Winner of the National Book Award for Translation in 1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394752846
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/12/1987
Series:	Pantheon Modern Writers Series
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	109,161
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.99(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

JULIO CORTÁZAR was born in Brussels to Argentinian parents in 1914, was raised in Argentina, and in 1952 moved to Paris, where he continued to live for the rest of his life. He was a poet, translator, an amateur jazz musician as well as the author of several novels and volumes of short stories. Ten of his books have been published in English: The Winners, Hopscotch (which won the National Book Award), Blow-Up and Other Stories, Cronopios and Famas, 62: A Model Kit, A Change of Light, We Love Glenda So Much, and A Certain Lucas. He received the Prix Médicis Award (France, 1974) and the Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence (Nicaragua, 1983), among other accolades. Considered one of the great modern Latin American authors, he died in Paris in February 1984.

Read an Excerpt

Hopscotch

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By Julio Cortazar

Pantheon

Copyright © 1987 Julio Cortazar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780394752846

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Chapter 7

"I touch your mouth. I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger. I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.
 
You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar Copyright © 1987 by Julio Cortazar. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Cortazar's masterpiece . . . the first great novel of Spanish America."
—The Times Literary Supplement

"The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers."
—The New Republic

"A work of the most exhilarating talent and interest."
—Elizabeth Hardwick

Editorial Reviews

"The most magnificent novel I have ever read, and one to which I shall return again and again."
—C.D.B. Bryan, The New York Times Book Review

"Cortazar's masterpiece . . . The first great novel of Spanish America."
—The Times Literary Supplement

"The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers."
—The New Republic

"A work of the most exhilarating talent and interest."
—Elizabeth Hardwick

From the Publisher