Julio Cortázar Died 42 Years Ago and You're Still Not Reading Him Right

Here's a confession that might get me banned from every literary circle in Buenos Aires: most people who claim to love Julio Cortázar have never actually finished Hopscotch. They've flipped through it, admired its clever structure, posted about it on social media, and quietly returned it to the shelf. And honestly? Cortázar would have found that hilarious.

Forty-two years ago today, on February 12, 1984, one of the most audacious literary minds of the twentieth century stopped breathing in Paris. But here's the thing about Cortázar—he never really believed in endings anyway. His novels loop back on themselves, his stories dissolve into ambiguity, and his characters exist in perpetual states of becoming. Death, for a writer like him, was probably just another chapter you could choose to skip.

Let's talk about Hopscotch for a moment, because it's the elephant in every room where Cortázar is discussed. Published in 1963, this monster of a novel came with instructions: you could read it straight through, or you could hopscotch between chapters following an alternative sequence the author provided. It was like a literary choose-your-own-adventure for intellectuals who smoked too much and argued about jazz at 3 AM. The book didn't just break the fourth wall; it invited you to help demolish the entire building.

What made Cortázar genuinely dangerous—and I use that word deliberately—was his refusal to accept that fiction had rules. When he wrote "Blow-Up," the short story that Michelangelo Antonioni would transform into his iconic 1966 film, he created something that still messes with your head decades later. A photographer enlarges his images and discovers... what exactly? A murder? A hallucination? The limits of perception itself? Cortázar never tells you, because telling you would be a betrayal of everything he believed about art. The uncertainty IS the point.

But here's where things get spicy. Cortázar wasn't just some avant-garde trickster playing games with narrative structure. The man was deeply political, fiercely committed to leftist causes in Latin America, and spent his final years advocating for human rights in Argentina during the military dictatorship. He gave away the prize money from his Médicis Prize to support political prisoners. This wasn't a writer hiding in an ivory tower made of experimental prose—this was someone who believed that breaking literary conventions and breaking political oppression were part of the same revolutionary project.

"62: A Model Kit" might be his most underrated work, and also his most infuriating. It's essentially Cortázar taking a throwaway idea from Chapter 62 of Hopscotch and spinning it into its own novel. Characters blur into each other, cities overlap, time becomes negotiable. Reading it feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture while mildly intoxicated—you know all the pieces are there, you're just not sure they go together the way the instructions suggest. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the instructions are lying to you.

What's remarkable about Cortázar's influence today is how it operates through channels most people don't recognize. Every time a video game presents you with a non-linear narrative, every time a prestige TV show plays with timeline and perspective, every time a novelist decides that the reader should work for their meaning—there's a ghost of Cortázar hovering nearby, chain-smoking Gitanes and looking smug. He didn't invent metafiction, but he made it sexy. He made it feel like rebellion rather than pretension.

The Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 70s gave us García Márquez's magical villages and Borges's infinite libraries. Cortázar contributed something different: the city as labyrinth, the everyday as portal to the uncanny. His Paris and Buenos Aires are places where reality has thin spots, where stepping through a door might land you somewhere logic refuses to follow. In an age when we're all doom-scrolling through digital labyrinths of our own making, his vision feels uncomfortably prescient.

Here's my controversial take, and I'm sticking to it: Cortázar is more relevant now than he was when he died. We live in an era of hyperlinks and rabbit holes, where information doesn't flow linearly but branches and loops. We consume narratives through binge-watching and choose-your-own-path streaming specials. We've built an entire internet that functions exactly like Hopscotch—you can go through it in order, or you can jump around following your own weird algorithm of interest. Cortázar saw this coming, or maybe he helped create it.

The man once said that literature is a game, but a game you can lose your life to. Not waste your life on—lose it to, like falling into something that swallows you whole. Forty-two years after his death, that invitation still stands. You can pick up Hopscotch and read it the boring way, or you can trust the author's mad hopscotch pattern and see where you land. You can treat "Blow-Up" as a puzzle to be solved, or you can accept that some mysteries are meant to stay mysterious.

So here we are, four decades and change later, still arguing about what Cortázar meant, still discovering new readers who stumble into his labyrinths and emerge slightly different. The Paris rain that fell the day he died has long since dried, but something he planted keeps growing—in literature, in film, in the very way we think about what stories can do. Not bad for a tall Argentine who believed that reality was just one option among many, and probably not even the most interesting one.