Rayuela

Notes & Review

Cortázar opens Rayuela with a table of instructions: you can read the chapters in order (1–56) for a conventional novel, or you can follow his alternate sequence — jumping between chapters in a pattern that incorporates 100 "expendable" chapters not included in the linear reading. He means it literally: the book has two different reading orders and you choose.

This isn't a trick. It's a philosophical position. Cortázar believes the reader is a participant in meaning-making, not a passive recipient. The hopscotch of the title — rayuela in Spanish — is the game: you jump, you might land wrong, you play again.

The Paris sections, following a group of bohemian intellectuals in the 1950s, are melancholy and beautiful. The Buenos Aires sections that follow are stranger, more fragmented. Together they form something that resists summary — which is, I suspect, exactly the point.