Books: 8 X 8 = Gliglish

HOPSCOTCH by Julio Cortazar. 564 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

By the exacting standards of Julio Cortázar, a lazy reader is one who expects the author to do all the work. Such a reader assumes that a story will unwind consecutively, rationally, grammatically, before his indolent eyes. The sentences parse, the paragraphs link, the chapters march, good soldiers all, to a dramatically acceptable denouement. So much for the lazy reader. Author Cortázar wants nothing to do with him.

Path of Obstacles. Hopscotch is aptly named. Not since Ulysses have so many obstacles strewn the path of understanding. The first 56 chapters are to be read in numerical order. At that point the reader, obeying Cortázar's Table of Instructions, is asked to leapfrog ahead to Chapter 73 and then hopscotch about in all directions on a course that, if followed, means reading 56 chapters twice and one chapter four times—all told, 900 pages.

Along this bewildering route, the author's meaning must usually be guessed at; nobody's going to catch Julio Cortázar making things too clear. "Sometimes I am convinced," muses one character, "that the triangle is another name for stupidity, that eight times eight is madness or a dog." When this character, a Uruguayan woman called La Maga, goes to bed with Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine, they make love in "Gliglish": "Right away she tordled her hurgales, allowing him gently to bring up his orfelunes."

Glints of Skill. Behind Cortázar's stubbornly obscurantist prose falls the shadow of a story. Its central figure is Oliveira, one of a group of frayed Left Bank intellectuals who read Carson McCullers, play old Coleman Hawkins records and dither boozily about reality. Oliveira is a man suffering from "world-ache" and Baudelairean tastes; the two go together. He is later seen in Buenos Aires, where he has gone either to look for La Maga, whom he has lost, or for his own identity, which he has never found. In the company of old friends, he meanders through bohemia, with stops at a one-ring circus and an insane asylum.

Cortázar, 51, an Argentine novelist now living in Paris, has already evoked comparisons with Sterne, Proust and Joyce, and certainly Hopscotch's obfuscation is occasionally relieved by glints of unmistakable skill. Here and there a single sentence escapes the darkness with epigrammatic force: "All madness is a dream that has taken root."

But that scarcely excuses the darkness. To compare Cortázar to Sterne, who was one of his models, is to measure the vast difference between a severely disciplined though innovationist literary-talent and one that, however sophisticated, is hung up on literary games.