NP but Cortazar. Hopscotch and the anti-binary--re the law of the excluded middle

[Mark Kohut]

Wonderful post, Thomas, exciting! Making the novel live where it isn't
really living---here.

I am loving it, reading it slowly and I think even with just some of what
you've posted there is some influence on much of the later fiction,
starting with Lot 49....

On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 5:09 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de
> wrote:

> "Hopscotch", ah...
>
> This author puts it very well:
>
> http://quarterlyconversation.com/hopscotch-by-julio-cortazar-review
>
> The Wiki entry is also good.
>
> A few additional associative and stenographic remarks based on quickly
> thumbing through my old German edition (I once tried to read it in Spanish
> but found that it was way too difficult):
>
> Links to Pynchon's novels are obvious. Not necessarily direct influence at
> the time (1963) but definitely shared sensibilities.
>
> Jazz, randomness, non-linearity, an all-pervading sense, very well
> articulated by the characters, that rationalism is not enough, but most of
> all a rage against convention, linguistically and otherwise. One of my
> personal favorites is a passage (which I cannot find right now) about how
> the world is given to us pre-fabricated, reminding me of Hugo von
> Hoffmannthals "Letter to Lord Chandos". Hence the despair of the
> protagonist and the formal and linguistic experiments of the author.
>
> As a predecessor for some of the experiments: Tristram Shandy.
>
> Chapter 28, which I found difficult to understand, even disturbing, at the
> time, is the centre of the first part of the book which comprises 56
> chapters as I just now realized. It is not hard to see why.
>
> Even more than with Pynchon, the innovations and the conceptual stuff is
> all fine and dandy (with Pynchon this pertains also to the unusual subjects
> of some of his novels) but wouldn't be worth a lot if the prose wasn't up
> to the task. It more than is.
>
> The second epigraph takes its cue from the beginning of "Moby-Dick", I
> just now realized.
>
> Wiki sez that Cortázar was an admirer of Jules Verne for all of his life.
> Just like Doc in "Back to the Future"... Invention!
>
> All in all, indispensable reading for admirers of Pynchon.
>
> After "Hopscotch", I recommend "Libro de Manuel" (much more political) and
> "El Perseguidor" (inspired by the life of Charlie Parker). That is, of
> course, only if you have already read the short stories...
>
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