SOURCE: "Hopscotch: The Novel as Pandora's Box," in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. III, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 86-8.

Fuentes is a Mexican novelist, dramatist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. In the following essay, which was originally published in the journal Mundo Nuevo in March 1967 and here translated by Naomi Lindstrom, Fuentes discusses the structure and poetics of Cortázar's Hopscotch and compares the novel to James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).

The French reader knows Julio Cortázar by way of a marvelous collection of elliptical stories, End of the Game (one of which served as the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film, Blow-Up), and to a lengthy allegorical novel, The Winners. The publication of Hopscotch will show that these works were warm-ups leading to this work, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement of London as "The first great novel of Spanish America." It would be fair to state that...