A Novel with Two Orders

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Julio Cortazar's 1963 novel Hopscotch opens with a Table of Instructions offering the reader two ways through the book: straight through its first 56 chapters in order, or hopscotching through all 155 chapters in a second sequence the author specifies, which loops back through material the first reading skips. The structure was an unusually direct challenge to the idea that a novel has one correct reading order, and it became one of the most discussed formal experiments to come out of the Latin American Boom, imitated and debated by later writers working in nonlinear form.