Julio Cortazar

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.

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 left Argentina for Paris in 1951; his anti-Peronist views prompted the move, and he lived there for the rest of his life while continuing to write and publish in Spanish for an Argentine and wider Latin American readership. His physical distance from Buenos Aires did not distance him from Argentine subject matter, and later in his life he became an outspoken supporter of leftist causes across Latin America, including Cuba's and Nicaragua's revolutionary governments, donating the royalties from his novel A Manual for Manuel to the families of political prisoners.