Five Stars go to "Axolotl" - though one horrible sentence could easily have gone.

The rest are depressing, boring, sickening, or bloody... ( )

I read Hopscotch many years ago and loved it, but for some reason didn’t pick up anymore Cortazar until now.

I remember not so much about Hopscotch but this book jogged my memory a bit- my favorite stories in this collection were definitely the more realistic ones (Blow Up, End of the Game, The Pursuer) where Cortazar’s formal experiments can really shine. In the more surreal/ symbolic stories I sometimes lost my foothold, which maybe was the point, but mixing the dream like plot with the shifting narrators and time frames sometimes made it all feel a little muddled.

What made the stories I mentioned above so excellent was the way Cortazar zips around his characters like a ghost possessing, showing the other side of the mirror so to speak. I love how you can feel the improvisation in his language, where he lets his mind just spool out on the page - appropriate for a writer that seemed to have a great love for jazz. The best this book has to offer is a master class in what you can do when you are well practiced and the ideas are flowing. ( )

Well. 10 years ago I wanted to read a specific story in this collection. I'll hope it was the Axolotl story; I quite liked that and honestly it gave me everything I needed to know about the collection. There are a few others I enjoyed and a couple that I found troubling, though after some thought I think he was addressing views rather than expressing them. Anyway, an excellent writer, but I think a handful of well-chosen stories would have been better than the full anthology I'm reading from. ( )

I don't know how to rate this -- the writing is wonderful but the stories themselves were not my cup of tea. Too bizarre... ( )

The title story is, of course, probably what made Cortázar famous b/c Antonioni made a film from it. Now, how many people even remember Antonioni when we have so many flashy superhero movies to choose from? ( )