FL 380: An Archaeology of the "Boom": Modern Latin American Prose Fiction


Reading Guide to Cortázar #3

Hopscotch


  1. 219 The doppelgänger: Traveler
  2. 220 The black brick
  3. 222 Talita: Her understanding of self, others, and the human condition.
  4. 225 "You don't have to talk if you don't want to"
  5. 226 Horacio's quest: "He had to keep going, either start over..."
  6. 228 Coming back v. going away: return v. exile
  7. 230 "How they loved to play with words..."
  8. 231 Living absurdly???: "Don Crespo thought they were crazy..."
  9. 231 "There were nights when everybody..."
  10. 234 A narrator that empathizes...
  11. 239 A bridge: "That's not a bad idea at all..."
  12. 247 "Those two have got another bridge..."
  13. 248 "You come up right to the edge..."
  14. 253 Doppelgänger: "You're probably aware that all this trouble..."
    a. "There's no reason to hide..."
  15. 256 "Did all that happen? (. . .) They're two different matters."
  16. 257 "We're so bland it's unbearable, Manú."
  17. 262 "...Talita thought that it was also good to collect..."
  18. 265 "Now that I think of it, when you're present..."
    a. A trance, a message, a contact?
  19. 271 "Yes, you're just like him..."
  20. 271 "It isn't because of Horacio, love, it isn't only because..."
    a. "those unexpected evidences of something..."
    b. "It's something fucking else, God damn it!"
  21. 272 "And if he were here..."
  22. 275 "But it's as if something is talking..."
  23. 278 "All in all (. . .) it occurs to me sometimes that you..."
  24. 281 "Explanation is a well dressed mistake."
  25. 283 "I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I..."
  26. 290 "The worst of it was..."
    a. "To know that he was in love with La Maga..."
  27. 291 "It could have been easy to organize a coherent scheme..."
  28. 302 "...that this was all a comedy of idiots..."
  29. 304 "As if we were vampires, as if a single..."
  30. 306 "One of these nights I'm going to tell you about over there..."
  31. 314 "Oliveira knew that everything was coming back into order..."
  32. 316 "Talita wasn't surprised by anything..."
  33. 317 "So I look like that other woman"
    a. "I'm nobody's zombie"
  34. 319 "The (and Talita was there, fifteen feet...."
    a. The prodigal son (of a bitch)...
  35. 320 "The past had become turned around . . . pity on him..."
  36. 321 "a madness so absolute that Manú, and everything that..."
  37. 325 "He thinks she's dead, Manú, and at the same time..."
    a. "a contagion that came from farther off..."
    b. "So the poor devil is afraid..."
  38. 326 "He's so happy to be afraid tonight..."
  39. 335 Two possible forms of the encounter between Horacio and Traveler; between the monkey and the territory.
  40. 340 "I'm alive..."
    a. "And you don't want to pay anything".
    b. "an existential puritan"
    c. "Do you think I'm not surprised..."
  41. 344-5 "We'd all like to have the millenary kingdom..."
    a. "there wouldn't be any more of this game of substitutions..."
    b. "you're in harmony with the territory..."
  42. 346 "They call that being crazy."
    a. "Oliveira closed his eyes and thought that..."
  43. "That's the way it was, harmony lasted..."
  44. 349 The end??