Whether it’s the Joycean stream of consciousness in literature or jazz improvisation in music. Whether it’s the soft clocks of Salvador Dalí’s La persistència de la memòria or the almost three-dimensional and multi-perspective movement of Umberto Boccioni‘s The City Rises in the art field. That is why a continuous implosion of the coordinates of time and space takes place in the novel. But to be rethought, reality must first be destroyed. The center is the point where reality can be reinvented. Maga, a mysterious feminine character, and the center. The novel’s protagonist’s (a student called Horacio Oliveira) primary goal is to find two things. Kind of like the hopscotch game – and Rayuela indeed means just that, hopscotch. With Rayuela, this process is extreme, and with instructions in hand, the reader can move back and forth through a novel that has no center at all. In 1978, the literary critic Wolfgang Iser stated ( The Act of Reading) that the reader fills the gaps and co-participates in the process of constructing the novel. In 1962 Umberto Eco published Opera Aperta. A treasure hunt, an enigma, a counter-novel: a game.Ī novel, even when it is not as experimental as Cortázar’s ones, is always the center of a three-way relationship consisting of a book, author, and reader. The second is to begin reading from chapter 73 and, from there, follow the instructions of the writer himself. The first is to read the novel as if it were a regular book, and therefore from beginning to end. There are two possible ways to read Rayuela, warns its author, the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. In fact, as soon as the readers open a book like Rayuela, they will be faced with an unusual note: instructions for playing with the novel.

And what does Monopoly have in common with the Goose game? Before starting, one must read the instructions. Never as before, in the years of the pandemic and reduced sociality, board games have been back in vogue.

Rayuela by julio cortazar