Julio Cortázar Broke the Novel in Half — And We Still Can't Put It Back Together

Forty-two years ago today, a man who taught us to read backwards, sideways, and in spirals stopped breathing in Paris. Julio Cortázar didn't just write books — he detonated them. He handed you a novel and said, "Here, read it in any order you want," decades before hyperlinks made that idea feel normal. And the wildest part? We're still not ready for what he actually did.

Let's get the obituary facts out of the way. Julio Cortázar died on February 12, 1984, in Paris, of leukemia, though some say it was actually AIDS from a blood transfusion — a detail the Argentine government conveniently preferred not to discuss. He was 69 years old, an Argentine who had lived in France for over three decades, a giant of a man — literally six-foot-six — who looked like a gentle philosophy professor and wrote like a jazz musician on a particularly inspired Tuesday night.

Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room: Hopscotch. Published in 1963, Rayuela — its Spanish title — is the novel that broke the mold and then set the mold on fire. Cortázar gave readers two options: read it straight through from chapter 1 to 56, or follow a hopscotch pattern he designed, jumping between 155 chapters in an order that includes "expendable" sections most people never bother with. This wasn't a gimmick. This was a philosophical argument disguised as a parlor trick. Cortázar was essentially saying: why should the author be the dictator of your reading experience? Why can't you co-create the meaning? In 1963, that was radical. Today, when we navigate Wikipedia rabbit holes and choose-your-own-adventure Netflix specials, it feels prophetic.

But here's what people get wrong about Cortázar: they reduce him to Hopscotch. That's like reducing the Beatles to "Hey Jude." Sure, it's the big hit, but the real magic is in the deep cuts. Take "Blow-Up," the short story that Michelangelo Antonioni turned into his 1966 Palme d'Or-winning film. The story — originally called "Las babas del diablo" (The Devil's Drool, which is a far better title, let's be honest) — is about a photographer who captures something in a park photo that he can't quite identify. Was it a crime? A seduction? A ghost? Cortázar never tells you. He lets the ambiguity eat you alive. Antonioni understood this perfectly, turning it into a film about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain. Every thriller that plays with unreliable perception — from Memento to Gone Girl — owes a quiet debt to that story.

Then there's 62: A Model Kit, which might be his most underappreciated masterpiece. Born from Chapter 62 of Hopscotch (yes, he literally spun a novel out of a single chapter), it's a book where characters exist in a kind of dream logic, where cities bleed into each other, where a group of friends in Paris and London and Vienna seem to be living each other's lives without knowing it. Reading it feels like scrolling through multiple browser tabs simultaneously — which, again, he wrote in 1968, when the most advanced technology was color television. The man wasn't predicting the internet; he was predicting the internet brain.

What makes Cortázar's influence so hard to pin down is that it's atmospheric rather than structural. You can point to García Márquez's magical realism or Borges's labyrinths and say, "There, that's the trick." With Cortázar, the trick is the feeling. It's that uncanny sensation that reality has a crack in it, and if you look at it from just the right angle, something else leaks through. His short stories — "Axolotl," "House Taken Over," "The Night Face Up" — all operate on this principle. They start in the mundane and end in the impossible, but the transition is so seamless that you can't point to the exact moment things went sideways. That's not technique. That's sorcery.

And let's not ignore the political Cortázar, because he'd haunt us if we did. This was a man who supported the Cuban Revolution, championed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and was stripped of his Argentine citizenship by the military junta. He wasn't an armchair revolutionary — he served on the Russell Tribunal investigating human rights abuses in Latin America. His political engagement wasn't separate from his art; it fed it. The surrealism in his fiction isn't escapism. It's a way of saying: the real world is already absurd, already monstrous, already impossible. I'm just showing you what you've trained yourself not to see.

Forty-two years later, Cortázar's fingerprints are everywhere, even when people don't recognize them. Every time a video game lets you choose your narrative path, every time a novelist plays with fragmented timelines, every time a filmmaker leaves the ending deliberately ambiguous — that's Cortázar's ghost, grinning that tall, gentle grin of his. The Netflix show "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" is essentially Hopscotch with a budget. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is 62: A Model Kit with better marketing. Charlie Kaufman's entire career is one long Cortázar short story.

But here's the thing that really gets me, and it's the reason I keep coming back to his work every few years: Cortázar genuinely believed that literature could change how you perceive reality. Not in a self-help, "this book changed my life" way. In a neurological, almost hallucinogenic way. He believed that if a story was constructed precisely enough, it could rewire your relationship with the world around you. He called it "the feeling of not being entirely here" — that productive disorientation that makes you question whether the table you're sitting at is really solid, whether the person across from you is really who they say they are.

Is that pretentious? Maybe. But name me another writer who makes you feel it rather than just talk about it. You read "Axolotl" — a story about a man who visits an aquarium so often that he becomes the salamander he's been watching — and for three days afterward, you catch yourself staring at your own reflection a little too long. That's not pretension. That's power.

So here we are, 42 years after Cortázar stopped breathing in that Paris hospital. The literary establishment has more or less canonized him, which he would have hated. University syllabi dissect Hopscotch into digestible chunks, which misses the entire point. And a new generation discovers him through TikTok recommendations, which — actually, he probably would have loved that. A medium built on randomness, fragmentation, and the collapse of linear narrative? That's basically Cortázar's aesthetic manifesto made into an app.

If you haven't read him, don't start with Hopscotch. I know that's heresy, but hear me out. Start with the short stories. Start with "Blow-Up and Other Stories" or "End of the Game." Let the short-form magic work on you first. Let yourself get comfortable with the cracks in reality. Then, when you're ready, open Hopscotch — and for the love of everything sacred, read it in the hopscotch order. Don't take the easy way out. Cortázar didn't build that labyrinth so you could walk around it.

Because that's the final lesson of Julio Cortázar, the one that matters more now than it did in 1984: the straight line is a lie. Life doesn't move from A to B. Stories don't have beginnings, middles, and ends — not really. And the reader who insists on sitting passively while the author does all the work is missing the entire game. Cortázar handed us the hopscotch stone 63 years ago. The question is whether we're brave enough to keep jumping.