Julio Cortázar's masterpiece. A novel that shook the cultural landscape of its time and marked an inescapable milestone in contemporary narrative.
"Counter-novel", "chronicle of madness", "the black hole of an enormous funnel", "a fierce jerk by the lapels", "a cry of alarm", "a kind of atomic bomb", "a call to necessary disorder", "a gigantic joke", "a babble".
These and other expressions were used to refer to Rayuela after its appearance in 1963. Without a doubt, the publication of the novel shook the cultural panorama of its time and represented a true revolution in narrative in the Spanish language: for the first time a writer took to its ultimate consequences the will to transgress the traditional order of a story and the language to tell it.
Full of literary and vital ambition, a renovator of narrative tools, a destroyer of the established and a seeker of the roots of poetry, it is perhaps the book in which Cortázar is fully present, with all his ethical and aesthetic complexity, with his imagination and his humor. And, more than 5 decades after its first publication, Rayuela continues to be read with curiosity, wonder, interest and devotion.
Cortázar begins by proposing an active approach to the book and offers several reading possibilities: the reader has to decide: should he opt for the traditional reading order? Should he follow the direction board? Should he refer to chance? He then takes the reader to two different places: “On the other side”, Paris, the relationship between Oliveira and La Maga, the snake club, Horacio’s first descent into hell; and “On the other side”, Buenos Aires, the meeting between Traveler and Talita, the circus, the asylum, the second descent.
A journey forward? A journey backwards? A journey of initiation, without a doubt, from which the reader emerges perhaps with a different idea about the way of reading books and seeing life. A mosaic in which an entire era was wonderfully reflected.
