Julio Cortázar Broke the Novel — And Nobody Has Fixed It Since

Forty-two years ago, on February 12, 1984, a man who taught us that a book doesn't have to be read from beginning to end died in Paris. His name was Julio Cortázar, and if you've never heard of him, congratulations — you've been reading literature with training wheels on.

Here's the thing about Cortázar: he didn't just write experimental fiction. He detonated the very concept of what a novel could be, then walked away from the wreckage whistling a jazz tune. Born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentine parents, raised in Buenos Aires, and eventually self-exiled to Paris, he was a man who belonged everywhere and nowhere — which, if you think about it, is the perfect biography for someone who spent his career demolishing boundaries.

Let's talk about Hopscotch, because that's the grenade he lobbed into world literature in 1963. The novel comes with instructions — actual instructions — telling you that you can read it in at least two different ways. The first 36 chapters form one story. But if you hopscotch through all 155 chapters in the order Cortázar suggests, you get a completely different book. A different experience. A different philosophy of existence. This was 1963, people. The Beatles hadn't even released Sgt. Pepper yet, and this Argentine madman was already inventing the literary equivalent of a choose-your-own-adventure for intellectuals. Every hypertext novel, every interactive fiction game, every Netflix "choose your path" special owes a debt to this book. Cortázar didn't predict the internet — he predicted how we would think after the internet.

But reducing Cortázar to Hopscotch is like reducing Bowie to Ziggy Stardust. His short stories are where he really shows his fangs. Take "Blow-Up" — a photographer takes pictures in a Paris park, develops them, and discovers something sinister lurking in the background of his shots. Michelangelo Antonioni turned it into a film in 1966, relocated to swinging London, and won the Palme d'Or. The movie is a masterpiece. But Cortázar's original story is stranger, more unsettling, more fundamentally weird. Where Antonioni gave us cool detachment, Cortázar gave us existential vertigo — the terrifying possibility that reality is just a photograph we haven't developed yet.

Then there's 62: A Model Kit, published in 1968, which is essentially Cortázar saying, "You thought Hopscotch was confusing? Hold my mate." The novel grew out of Chapter 62 of Hopscotch — yes, a whole novel born from a single chapter of another novel, like some literary Russian nesting doll. Characters bleed into each other, cities overlap, time collapses. Most critics at the time had no idea what to do with it. Some still don't. But here's what's fascinating: read it now, in 2026, and it feels prophetic. The way identities merge and fragment, the way physical spaces become interchangeable — Cortázar was writing about how it feels to live online decades before anyone had a Wi-Fi password.

What made Cortázar genuinely dangerous — and I use that word deliberately — was his insistence that reading should be an active, even combative act. He called the passive reader a "female reader" (yes, this was the 1960s, and yes, that's aged terribly), but his core point survives its own sexism: he wanted readers who would fight the text, rearrange it, refuse its authority. He wanted accomplices, not audiences. In an era where algorithms feed us exactly what we already like, Cortázar's demand that we work for our meaning feels almost revolutionary.

His influence is everywhere, even when people don't realize it. Paul Auster's labyrinthine plots? Cortázar was there first. Haruki Murakami's surreal intrusions of the fantastic into everyday life? Cortázar had been doing that since the 1950s, with stories like "House Taken Over," where an unnamed something gradually forces two siblings out of their ancestral home, room by room. Roberto Bolaño worshipped him. Borges — yes, that Borges — published Cortázar's first story under a pseudonym in 1946 and later called him one of the great writers of the Spanish language. When Borges gives you a compliment, you've basically won literature.

But there's a melancholy to Cortázar's story too. He spent his later years deeply committed to left-wing politics in Latin America, supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the socialist project in Cuba. He became a French citizen in 1981 as a protest against Argentina's military junta. And he died at 69, reportedly of leukemia, though some friends whispered it was AIDS-related — his wife had died of the same disease just months earlier. Paris, the city he loved and made his own, was where he breathed his last. He's buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, not far from Sartre and Beauvoir, which feels right: he was always more Parisian than the Parisians, more existentialist than the existentialists, more everything than everyone.

What stays with me most about Cortázar is his fundamental playfulness. Literature, for him, wasn't a cathedral — it was a jazz club. You could improvise, riff, go off-script. His cronopios and famas — those absurd little creatures from his 1962 collection — are basically his philosophy of life distilled into fiction. Cronopios are the dreamers, the artists, the beautiful disasters. Famas are the bureaucrats, the rule-followers, the people who alphabetize their spice racks. Cortázar was a cronopio to the bone, and he wanted us all to be cronopios too.

Forty-two years after his death, we live in a world that desperately needs more cronopios. We live in a world of algorithmic famas — systems that sort, categorize, optimize, and strip the unpredictability from everything. Cortázar would have looked at our curated feeds and personalized recommendations and laughed, then probably written a short story in which a man's Spotify playlist slowly begins controlling his decisions, leading him through Buenos Aires to a door that opens into a Paris that no longer exists.

So here's my challenge to you, whoever you are, reading this in 2026: pick up Hopscotch. Read it wrong. Start at Chapter 73, then jump to 1, then 116, then wherever the hell you want. Cortázar gave you permission to break his book, and breaking things — gently, creatively, with love and mischief — is the most Cortázarian act imaginable. Forty-two years gone, and the man is still teaching us how to play.