![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() That suspicion of grand narratives-both in literature and in life-informs much of Literature Class, a newly published collection of eight lectures the writer delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. ![]() Of his magnum opus, Cortázar said, laconically, “I’ve remained on the side of the questions.” But it was the novel’s formal daring-its branching paths-that hinted at what was to be the Argentine author’s most persistent and most personal inquiry: Why should there be only one reality? Both reading modes follow the world-weary antihero Horacio Oliveira, Cortázar’s proxy protagonist, who is disenchanted with the tepid certainties of bourgeois life, and whose metaphysical explorations form the scaffolding of a billowing, richly comic existential caper. Famously, it includes an introductory “table of instructions”: “This book consists of many books,” Cortázar writes in it, “but two books above all.” The first version is read traditionally, from chapter one straight through the second version begins at chapter seventy-three, and snakes through a non-linear sequence. “What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature?” The question comes from Julio Cortázar’s landmark 1963 novel Hopscotch, the dense, elusive, streetwise masterpiece that doubles as a High Modernist choose-your-own-adventure game. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |