Julio Cortázar is a writer who has thrown off the restrictions of mental Calvinism imposed by the past century and still so much with us…. [He] finds that life imitates art and that homo ludens must precede homo faber ("homo faber & faber," as he calls him in Libro de Manuel). This is most evident in his conception of structure. A form is of its own making, an object is defined by its use, as Ortega y Gasset has said, and the reader really creates his own novel as he goes forward. This is the starting point of Hopscotch, where Cortázar gives us a carefully ordered alternate version and also invites us to go to work and bring forth further variations. We have before us a rich lode of chiastic possibilities. When the novel was first published in the United States, a great many critics did not...