NP but obliquely relevant: Hopscotch

[Mark Kohut]

Spoiler ( but I won't name the numbered chapter) : There is an
ingenious chapter in Hopscotch in which Cortazar shows the inadequacy
of the old-fashioned 19th Century realistic novel for the present. A
character, major narrator character's girlfriend,  has a novel by
Perez Galdos, the Spanish Balzac, a writer who wanted to show the
naturalistic determinacy of lives in society, Wikipedia tells me.

Our intellectual indirect narrator writes, "after five pages one IS
hooked," like eating or shitting, ( what nice deterministic metaphors)
.....Then comes a counterpointed chapter in which two stories are told
in alternating lines, one of which is about the reading of a Galdos
novel by his girlfriend wherein early we read how else will we be able
to break the hold of such fiction ( but by such a new story-telling
way).. That thread builds to an argument to her about how life is
really more like Brownian movement, patterns like flies fly......NICE.

The chapter can  remind one obliquely of the Kenosha Kid section of GR
a little -seemingly discontinuous verbiage--if one has read that scene
a few times before reading HOPSCOTCH. But by the end, I was reading
the lines sequentially and sorta following both threads at once.  Talk
about overcoming cause & effect-- on the page at least.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l