Download Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar PDF

By Julio Cortazar

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian author who lives in Paris along with his mistress, los angeles Maga, surrounded by means of a loose-knit circle of bohemian acquaintances who name themselves "the Club." A kid's loss of life and los angeles Maga's disappearance positioned an finish to his lifetime of empty pleasures and highbrow acrobatics, and instructed Oliveira to come to Buenos Aires, the place he works by means of turns as a salesperson, a keeper of a circus cat which may really count number, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the outstanding, free-wheeling account of Oliveira's marvelous adventures.

Show description

Read or Download Hopscotch PDF

Similar caribbean & latin american books

Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism: Thl Vol 53 (Theory and History of Literature)

Thought and perform of Sociocriticism used to be first released in 1988. Minnesota Archive variants makes use of electronic expertise to make long-unavailable books once more obtainable, and are released unaltered from the unique collage of Minnesota Press variations. Edmond Cros is a number one French Hispanicist whose paintings is exclusive in Continental idea since it brings Spanish and Mexican texts into present literary debates, that have to this point founded usually at the French and German traditions.

Reading Borges after Benjamin : allegory, afterlife, and the writing of history

Including unique readings of a few of Benjamin's best essays, this publication examines a chain of Borges's works as allegories of Argentine modernity.

Extra resources for Hopscotch

Example text

During those days in the fifties I began to feel myself penned in between La Maga and a different notion of what really should have happened. It was idiotic to revolt against the Maga world and the Rocamadour world, when everything told me that as soon as I got my freedom back I would stop feeling free. A hypocrite like few others, it bothered me to spy on my own skin, my legs, my way to get pleasure from La Maga, my attempts at being a parrot in a cage reading Kierkegaard through the bars, and I think that what bothered me most was that La Maga had no idea at all that she was my witness, and on the contrary, was convinced that I was eminently master of my fate.

But I rejected them because the game consisted in bringing back only the insignificant, the unnoticed, the forgotten. Trembling at not being able to remember, attacked by those moths suggested by postponement, an imbecile for having kissed time, I finally saw beyond the shoes a can of Sol brand tea which my mother had given me in Buenos Aires. And the little double teaspoon, a mousetrap spoon, where little black mice were scalded alive in the cup of water as they gave off hissing bubbles. Convinced that memory keeps everything, not just the Albertines and the great journals of the heart and kidneys, I persisted in reconstructing the contents of my desk in Floresta, the face of a girl impossible to remember named Gekrepten, the number of drawing pens in my pencil box in the fifth grade, and I ended up trembling and desperate (because I had never been able to remember those pens; I know that they were in the pencil box, in a special compartment, but I cannot remember how many they were, nor the precise moment when there were two or six), until La Maga, kissing me and blowing smoke and her hot breath into my face, brought me back and we laughed, and we began to walk around again among the piles of rubbish, looking for the members of the Club.

I say so, God damn it! That I, Oliveira had begun to think, does it have any value as proof? What omniscience was contained in the Í of grownups? At the age of fifteen he discovered the business of "all I know is that I know nothing"; the hemlock that went with it seemed inevitable. One doesn't challenge people that way, I say so. " delicately disguised even for the person using them. Now he heard, "I've always thought so," "if I'm sure of anything . . ," "it's obvious that . . ," almost never softened by a disinterested appreciation of the other person's point of view.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.08 of 5 – based on 41 votes