Mandel’s Reviews > Hopscotch > Status Update

Having finished part II - which concludes the main narrative of the novel - I can't help but think Cortazar was influence by Beckett's Murphy, perhaps is an homage to Murphy. Both novels are about men crippled by their inability to engage with the world and other people. Both men estrange the women who are devoted to them, and end up working in an insane asylum, whose they find much in common with.

Part I is a story about the emptiness of bohemian intellectuals. Oliveira feels like a dark portrait of what I could have become had I never gotten over teen angst and intellectual self-importance. He's a man-child of a breed that is sadly all too common among academics, which makes it difficult to sympathize with him, and a pleasure to see him brought low by his own awfulness. Good on La Maga for ditching him!