This is my first Cortazar, and I'm convinced of his talent without being especially sold on the particulars of this novel itself. I loved plenty of instances of it, while remaining unconvinced that they formed an especially worthwhile whole. On the other hand, it's a densely philosophical work, and when the characters dove deep into theory as befits their Parisian ex-pat intellectual status (the aspect of this that I found most overwhelmingly tiresome), I often found myself letting the words stream past me, grabbing the what I could, or what I liked, or what spoke to me, and letting the rest pour away into oblivion. I mean, half the characters didn't really follow eachother either, so it's no surprise. But my point is, I could have put more effort into this, but the novel didn't really convince me that the effort would be worth it. So I just enjoyed what I enjoyed and didn't worry about every bit of tangled abstraction running out of Horacio Oliveira's head.

Even though I liked Horacio. He's a good image of a specific sort of academic gridlock: simultaneously needing a purpose so desperately that his life depends on it, and vehemently rejecting the possibility of meaning or purpose. An understandable position for cynics whose hearts still hold a kind of romance with the world. And Cortazar had some interesting things to say about his condition -- refusing to seize a cause because an external cause would be a kind of cop-out from figuring his own life out, refusing to let himself believe that age and wisdom, that the mass effect of experience, has any inherent worth -- that make the somewhat uninspired Search for Meaning at least occasionally worthwhile.

The parts I most loved were often the strange digressions and ornamentation -- the extra sections in the back of the book, leaped to as in a game of hopscotch, the strange textual experiments (interleaved lines, chapters that take place twice on different paths through the story), the window-bridge, the games the characters played. So the real complaint, I guess, is that I loved these things that, aside from the window-bridge scene, mostly occurred outside the narrative and thematic centers of the story. (Of course, there's a bit tucked away in here that posits a novel (another thing to love: a fine use of mis-en-abyme) emerging entirely from fragments and digressions, so it seems to be trying to cover its tracks there, too.

“Between sleep and wakefulness, diving into washbasins.” And it’s so easy, if you think about it a little, you ought to understand it. When you wake up, with the remains of a paradise half-seen in dreams hanging down over you like the hair on someone who’s been drowned: terrible nausea, anxiety, a feeling of the precarious, the false, especially the useless. You fall inward, while you brush your teeth you are really a diver into washbasins, it’s as if the white sink were absorbing you, as if you were slipping down through that hole that carries off tartar, mucus, rheum, dandruff, saliva, and you let yourself go in the hope that maybe you’ll return to the other thing, to what you were before you woke up, and it’s still floating around, is still inside you, is you for a moment, until the defenses of wakefulness, oh pretty words, oh language, take charge and stop you.

I piled up that and a bunch of other memorable quotes here, if interested for some reason.

One more thing, I kept hearing about Cortazar being real raw and scandalous, which this really wasn't, so you must have been stealing other dangerous books from your mother back in the Ukraine, Maya Edelman.