SOURCE: "On the Hop," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3392, March 9, 1967, p. 181.

In the following review, the critic praises Cortázar's use of language in Hopscotch, but overall finds the novel pretentious and "constantly straining for meanings."

Julio Cortázar is an Argentinian who, since the publication of Rayuela (or Hopscotch) in 1963, has acquired a reputation as the first great novelist of Latin America. Although this judgment is unfair to half a dozen of his contemporaries and one or two of his predecessors, his work, now widely translated, and perhaps rather too extravagantly promoted on the Continent and in the United States, certainly represents a remarkable achievement.

Señor Cortázar started as a writer of slightly Kafkaesque, slightly Borgesian short stories, most of them, on his own admission, the description of dreams in which an ordinary situation slipped almost imperceptibly into fantasy. The Winners (originally published in...