Joey Anderson’s Reviews > Hopscotch > Status Update

"For her, in truth, almost all books were one-book-less; she would have like to be overcome by an immense thirst and for an infinite period of time (figured as between three and five years) to read the complete works of Goethe, Homer, Dylan Thomas, Mauriac, Faulkner, Baudelaire, Roberto Arlt, Saint Augustine, and other writers whose names would keep coming up in conversation in the Club."

Sound familar?

"They liked to challenge the danger of not meeting, of spending the day alone sulking in a café or a park bench, reading-another-book. The another-book theory was Oliveira’s, and La Maga had accepted it by pure osmosis."

I read this novel forty years ago, and opening it again and reading the first chapter, I found it had the same charm as it did back then. A second virtue is that novels you read before act like a time machine and I remember much of what I was doing in the late seventies. La Maga is back as well as the search for the sugar cube.