Table of InstructionsThis review consists of two reviews. The first can be read in a normal fashion. Start from 1 and go to 12, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.The second should be read by beginning with 1 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each sentence or paragraph. For example, if you see “> 24”, then proceed to paragraph/sentence # 24 (which is conveniently labelled and bolded).From The Other Side1 I expected this book to be more inventive than it turned out to be, based mostly on how much hoopla there was around its experimental form. I had it in my head that the book could be read in an infinite variety of ways. While it certainly can be, the ‘instructions’ at the beginning specifies only 2 official ways of reading it. And besides, they are subsets of each other (with slight inconsistencies, for example chapter 55 is left out of one version). It seemed almost like watching a movie on a DVD and having the ability to watch it with or without the deleted scenes.But as I progressed, I felt that the flipping of pages had a different effect on me. > 17 2 It lent a physical structure to the route that the book was taking. Having the expendable chapters wedged in between the normal chapters instead of at the end would have resulted in pretty much the same novel, but would also have had a slightly different, lesser effect. The need to flip constantly back and forth made the enterprise into a kind of personal search, with a possibility of getting completely lost. > 273 This is an exciting possibility. Unlike in a normal book where I could gauge my progress by the heft of pages in my right vs. left hands (almost like a subconscious scale), in this book it was clear that the page I was on meant nothing at all. In parts, where the narrative took me on a whole string of hopping-around among the expendable chapters, I felt completely disoriented, but in a good way. Like I was swimming with no sight of the shore. > 234 What’s more, the expendable chapters can be seen as a sort of appendage to the main book. In this way, the book is not a thing with defined borders, but one that flows and overflows in soft focus. Because the novel talks constantly about literature itself, it is inevitable to think of all the works that the novel references (and there are many: Oblomov, The Man without Qualities, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Under the Volcano, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Confusions of Young Törless, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, to name just a few off the top of my head) as “expendable novels” that are part of this one if you were to just expand those fuzzy borders slightly. > 145 So that another way of reading this book (not included in the instructions at the beginning) would be to read it straight through but at any mention of another novel, you must go immediately and read it in its entirety, then come back to this book where you left off. > 296 Similarly, one could expand the borders even further to works influenced by this book (including Cortázar’s own 62: A Model Kit, inspired by chapter 62 of this book). Or even further into fictional works that exist only in the book, like Morelli’s novels, and Ceferino’s writings. One could keep going until this book included all of literature, or you die of exhaustion, whichever comes first (guess!). > 7From This Side7 But maybe all this bullshit about form is way overblown. Maybe it’s all an elaborate distraction so that the book itself can be hidden underneath: a quilt with its little hopscotch squares performing its exquisite covering-over-nature. > 208 Because the form of the book is so dazzling, its shimmering surface attracts the reviewers’ full attention. They can’t look away. What ends up being ignored are the things hidden underneath, which sheds light on the whole reason for the circuitous form to begin with. > 169 Throughout the book, Cortázar is concerned not only with literature and writing itself, but with the possibility of writing at all. Is it even possible to say a thing, to communicate with an ‘other’?If the person you are communicating with is truly an ‘other’, then communication would not be possible at all. For how can you talk unless you have some kind of shared experience? And yet if the other person was not an ‘other’ then they are the same as you, and you are in essence just talking to yourself. And what is the point of that? Mental masturbation. Therefore, is not the only worthy venture for language to communicate the impossible? To attempt interactions with an ‘other’ who will always misunderstand? > 2410 Then again, isn’t it sometimes harder to communicate with someone you’re close with? > 3111 At the center of this question is a deliberately silly scene. It’s morning and Oliviera wants some fresh maté as well as some straight nails. His best friend (Traveler) and wife (Talita) are just across the way, also on the same floor, but in an opposite apartment building. It would be easy for him to go downstairs, then go back up the stairs in Traveler’s apartment building, get the maté and nails, go back downstairs, then go up the stairs in his own apartment. Instead, they build an elaborate bridge from planks of wood and rope, weighing it down with the bed and the dresser and their own bodies like a scale. On this precarious contraption, Talita is asked to deliver the goods by crawling across the planks, risking a fall to her bloody death. This is a circus act made only more funny by its inelegant obviousness: Traveler and Talita actually work in a circus! > 2512 Even the simplest communications require a circus act. And yet, we all carry within ourselves some morsel of deep understanding about everything, some essence that is impossible to share. Is Cortázar saying it is not worth trying? No, he obviously went through the circus act of writing this book, and made you go through the circus act of flipping through the pages. Because, for Cortázar, this bridge (across what he calls the “unbridgeable distance”) is never achieved elegantly (but so humanly in its inelegance), and never completely. And precisely because of that, we should try all the harder. He seems to be saying “Look what fun can be had along the way!” (but watch out, you can also fall to your death) > 21***From Diverse Sides (Expendable Sentences):13 page 307: “The unbridgeable difference, a problem of levels that had nothing to do with intelligence or information” > 3314 “At the center is the metaphor of imaginative numbers. Torless learns of them in math class, and spends some pages thinking about how we can start with something completely real, apply an element that does not exist to it (but we pretend it does, temporarily, just for the sake of conjecture) and that the logical result of that (because the imaginative numbers eventually cancel each other out on both sides of the equation) is a real result. But that the bridge between the two real worlds is one that's completely made up.” -- from my Goodreads review of The Confusions of Young Törless > 2615 “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” --Walter Benjamin > 316 page 438: “Feeling that Heisenberg and I are from the other side of a territory, while the boy is still straddling with one foot in each without knowing it, and that soon he will be only on our side and all communication will be lost. Communication with what, for what?” > 917 By any literal definition, this book can be called a page turner. > 218 page 281: “that you would have given me such an urge to be different...” > 1219 “In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland the game is called Himmel und Hölle (Heaven and Hell) although there are also some other names used, depending on the region. The square below 1 or the 1 itself are called Erde (Earth) while the second to last square is the Hölle (Hell) and the last one is Himmel (Heaven). The first player throws a small stone into the first square and then jumps to the square and must kick the stone to the next square and so on, however, the stone or the player cannot stop in Hell so they try to skip that square.” -- Wikipedia > 2820 page 287: “This all seemed perfect to Talita and at the same time there was something like a bedcover about it, or a teapot cover, or some kind of cover, just like the recorder or Traveler’s satisfied air, things done or decided, to be put on top, but on top of what, that was the problem and the reason that everything underneath it all was still the way it had been before the half-linden, half-mint tea.” > 821 “For me, literature is a form of play. But I’ve always added that there are two forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then games that are very profound and serious. When children play, though they’re amusing themselves, they take it very seriously. It’s important. It’s just as serious for them now as love will be ten years from now. I remember when I was little and my parents used to say, “Okay, you’ve played enough, come take a bath now.” I found that completely idiotic, because, for me, the bath was a silly matter. It had no importance whatsoever, while playing with my friends was something serious. Literature is like that—it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.” -- Julio Cortázar > 1222 p160: “The actors speak and move about no one knows why or for what reason. We project our own ignorance into them and they seem like madmen to us, coming and going in a very decided way.” > 1923 “I’m about half way through the first part/side, and I remember what frustrates me about Cortázar. His prose is so delicious, but I find myself enjoying the back-and-forth of the characters’ dialogue much less. Especially in some sections in here I just want to be reading Cortázar’s hypnotic prose where he’s inside one of his character’s head, describing a feeling or idea rather than the constant chatter between characters. Within this chatter, the rhythm drops off, and my enjoyment does too.” > 2224 page 279: “...one draws back, from his best friend, no less, who is the one we have the most trouble telling such things to. Doesn’t it happen to you, that sometimes you confide much more in just anybody?” > 3125 In this picture, Oliviera and Traveler are two faces in a mirror, and yet Talita is the bridge that joins them. Only through her is communication possible. The whole scene is ridiculous and ridiculously obvious, but this awkwardness is precisely its charm. No, this is not an elegant metaphor with a poetic flourish. It's a messy one, with all these extra appendages. > 1826 With all the deliberate fragmentation going on in here, Cortázar seems unusually obsessed with the rather old fashioned idea of unity, or shall I say whunity. That “coherent scheme, an order of thought and life, a harmony” (p 291) > 527 page 442: “What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature?” > 3028 Sometimes these characters and their philosophical prattle annoy me, but I think Cortázar doesn’t always like them either, and is kind of making fun of them, which makes it suddenly OK to read 600 pages of it. (Or does it? It does if you love Cortázar’s prose to begin with I guess) Like all ‘big books’ this is a flawed one, but one which is so willing to make fun of itself, it seems. Even though on the surface it seems much more pretentious (the talks in the cafe about literature and philosophy might give this impression) underneath it all, there is a voice that never takes itself too seriously, a voice of loving laughter that is intensely self aware of its own pretensions (but realizes that those pretensions need to be said, that there is some limited (though dangerous) truth in them also). > 3429 page 179: "Gregorovius had given up the illusion of understanding things, but at any rate, he still wanted misunderstandings to have some sort of order, some reason about them." > 630 page 286: “It couldn’t be (there’s a reason for logic) that Horacio was interested and at the same time was not interested. The combination of the two things should have produced a third, something that had nothing to do with love ... something that was close to being a hunt, a search, or rather a terrible expectation, like the cat looking at the canary it cannot reach, a kind of congealing of time and day, a kind of crouching” > 1531 page 279: “The burden is the fact that real understanding is something else. We’re satisfied with too little. When friends understand each other well, when lovers understand each other well, when families understand each other well, then we think that everything is harmonious. Pure illusion, a mirror for larks.” > 3232 page 291: What is being compared between Pola and La Maga? There seems to be always some kind of measurement between two people, and perhaps not only of lovers. That we put them on a scale. This side, the other side, and beyond it: “a race or to a people and a language at least” > 1333 “You’re just like Horacio,” Talita says to Traveler. And while we're at it, what is the comparison being made between La Maga and Talita, whom Horacio mistakes for the former several times? Can a person serve as a bridge to be crossed over to another person? Or is the true metaphor here a scale, and not a bridge? Or is a bridge always a type of scale? When the scale tips over, the bridge crumbles. > 1134 It's ironic that in all their talking about literature, the Club refers to a lazy reader as a "feminine" reader. For all the blatant sexism in this novel, none of the male characters ever do anything. They talk a lot, but even an empty threat to take the sardines away from Celestin is never followed through (the most active thing done by a male character in this novel, that I can recall, is when Traveler fetches a hat for Talita from another room). It seems all they do is talk and travel (and drink maté), while the women do all the work. > 4
No es sencillo escribir sobre Rayuela porque éste definitivamente no es un libro común ni para todo el mundo. Por empezar, hay dos formas posibles de lectura: siguiendo la guía del principio del libro que nos hace saltar de atrás para adelante entre los 155 capítulos, o leyendo de corrido (y en versión más breve) del 1 al 56.Me pareció una genialidad el sistema y un lío bárbaro también. Es muy original e inteligente, y me gustó aún más cuando, mirándolo con más atención, me di cuenta de que ese desorden de la guía no es tan desordenado como creí (pero parece).Lo leí dos veces seguidas primero de forma ordenada y luego desordenada. La versión más extensa ayuda a comprender algunas cosas, como por ejemplo el por qué este libro está compaginado así. Hay un personaje que me pareció que podría ser el mismo Cortázar participando de su novela: un escritor llamado Morelli que le pide al protagonista que reuna los fragmentos de su libro que están distribuídos en su departamento, y supongo que esa es la razón de que la tabla de direcciones nos haga saltar tanto. Claramente Oliveira y compañía confundieron el orden de los capítulos.El primer capítulo es maravilloso.Mi primer pensamiento fue que los ojos se deslizaban sobre el texto como si fuera seda. Nos encontramos junto a Horacio Oliveira recorriendo las calles de París y pensando en La Maga.Con ella hay una relación de amor-odio que nunca queda clara, aunque en la versión extensa parece un poco más profundizada o explicada. Al leer los "capítulos prescindibles" que aparecen a partir del 56 da la sensación de que Oliveira realmente estuviese enamorado de ella. Leyendo la versión breve no parece tan así. No hay un esquema verdadero en este libro y por eso es dificil hablar de un argumento, además de que cambia de tipo de narrador constantemente. Lo dice Morelli: «Intentar en cambio un texto que no agarre al lector pero que lo vuelva obligadamente cómplice al murmurarle, por debajo del desarrollo convencional, otros rumbos más esotéricos.» y «Provocar, asumir un texto desaliñado, desanudado, incongruente, minuciosamente antinovelístico (aunque no antinovelesco).»Este libro es un caos organizado. Pero para encontrar lo organizado hay que traspasar el caos, y eso puede costar, especialmente el capítulo 34 donde intercala la lectura de un libro con los pensamientos de Horacio y que produce un efecto similar a un licuado cerebral.Y así me había encontrado con la Maga, que era mi testigo y mi espía sin saberlo, y la irritación de estar pensando en todo eso y sabiendo que como siempre me costaba mucho menos pensar que ser, que en mi caso el ergo de la frasecita no era tan ergo ni cosa parecida, con lo cual así íbamos por la orilla izquierda, la Maga sin saber que era mi espía y mi testigo, admirando enormemente mis conocimientos diversos y mi dominio de la literatura y hasta del jazz cool, misterios enormísimos para ella. Algunos capítulos son un terrible delirio y mezcla de frases extrañas que contra todo pronóstico tienen sentido y atrapan. Le da sentido a lo inconexo. Otros son diálogos o narraciones normales que mas o menos llevan una historia que nos muestra melancolía, jazz, alcohol y sensualidad. Oliveira, La Maga y los extraños miembros de El Club de la Serpiente son mentes solitarias y perdidas intentando ignorar el paso del tiempo y eligiendo que parte de la realidad contemplar. Hay conversaciones tan intelectuales en un punto como incoherentes pocas frases después. Es terrible lo que Cortázar divaga, se enrosca y se desenrosca para ciertos conceptos, y sin embargo hay algo atractivo y lleno de melancolía que no es sencillo ignorar. Por momentos incluso tuve la sensación de que simplemente se estaba riendo de los lectores, haciéndonos leer algunos de los recovecos de su mente en la voz de Oliveira. Es interesante y desconcertante por partes iguales. Pasa del delirio inconexo a la poesía tan abruptamente que hay que hacer un sacudón/despeje mental para darse cuenta de que el texto volvió a tener sentido. Es raro el efecto de esos capítulos, ahora comprendo por qué a este libro o lo aman o lo odian. Tardé sus buenas páginas en darme cuenta de que los momentos más delirantes pertenecían a la mente de Horacio. Cuando uno piensa lo hace de forma caótica y desordenada, y eso es precisamente lo que está escrito, muchas veces sin comas ni ningún otro signo de puntuación. De forma inesperada intercala frases en inglés, francés y pedazos de canciones. Todo es posible en esta contra-novela surrealista.Seamos serios, Horacio, antes de enderezarnos muy de a poco y apuntar hacia la calle, preguntémonos con el alma en la punta de la mano (¿la punta de la mano?) En la palma de la lengua, che, o algo así. Tiene algo que hace caer el ánimo y me costó mucho darme cuenta de qué era, pero creo que finalmente lo entendí.En principio creí que era porque están todos los personajes sumidos en la melancolía, porque ninguno realmente parece saber qué hacer con su vida o porque en el fondo son un grupo de no-adaptados que se juntan para hablar y no hacer mucho más que quejarse y opinar sobre todo pero sin que nadie realmente se mueva. Lo dice en el texto mismo: «Bueno, él era un argentino que llevaba un tiempo en parís, tratando de... Vamos a ver, ¿qué era lo que trataba de?»Pero finalmente llegué a la conclusión de que Rayuela es como un tango, y que lo que Cortázar buscó transmitir fue la melancolía porteña. Es curioso el efecto, te va volteando de a poco con melancolía, sentimentalismos de macho y una visión considerablemente negativa de todo. Hubo momentos en que tuve que cambiar de libro y leer algo más liviano porque mi ánimo se estaba cayendo de forma considerable.Además está lleno de argentinismos, cosa que me resultó muy raro al principio. Hay mucho lunfardo y una enorme cantidad de referencias a costumbres nacionales que a un extranjero le pueden resultar un poco desconocidas. Me pregunto cómo será la versión traducida a otros idiomas.De alguna manera habían ingresado en otra cosa, en ese algo donde se podía estar de gris y ser de rosa, donde se podía haber muerto ahogada en un río (y eso ya no lo estaba pensando ella) y asomar en una noche de Buenos Aires para repetir en la rayuela la imagen misma de lo que acababan de alcanzar, la última casilla, el centro del mandala, el Ygdrassil vertiginoso por donde se salía a una playa abierta, a una extensión sin límites, al mundo debajo de los párpados que los ojos vueltos hacia adentro reconocían y acataban. Me gustó haberlo leído en orden primero, es interesante la sensación de infinito que produce releer lo ya leído. No pasa como con otras novelas porque ésta es tan compleja y desestructurada (en sentido de que no hay realmente una linea cronologica demasiado palpable) que es dificil recordar qué había en cada capítulo. Además ahora ya conocía a los personajes y entendí mejor algunas de las cosas que dicen, o que se dice de ellos.Y así como hay dos formas de leerlo, también hay dos finales. Uno está en el capítulo 55 y es tan extraño como el resto del libro, y el otro... el otro es una especie de broma que una vez más nos juega Cortázar. Noté que en la versión extensa nunca pasamos por el capítulo 55, aunque ese mismo texto está incluído (o casi todo) en otro de los capítulos "prescindibles" y sigue adelante. Y es tonto porque todo eso duerme un poco en vos, no habría más que sumergirte en un vaso de agua como una flor japonesa y poco a poco empezarían a brotar los pétalos coloreados, se hincharían las formas combadas, crecería la hermosura.Decidirme por una nota fue complicado. Mi gran conflicto interno se generó por lo siguiente: objetivamente no cabe duda de que Rayuela es un libro excelente. Desde el sistema extraño hasta la forma de escribir es magnífico, tiene pasajes y frases maravillosas (muchas de las cuales me guardé)... pero por alguna razón no me logré conectar realmente ni con la historia ni con los personajes... así que opté por promediar.Y paf, se acabó.Reseña de Fantasía Mágica
Do You like book Hopscotch (1987)?
Original Review:Hopscotch, a sort of Argentinean Finnegans Wake, is noted for its “hopscotch” structure. If read the second way, the reader finishes up on Chapters 57 and 131, locked in an endless cycle of reading that ends only when his brain explodes. This method also omits Chapter 55, parts of which are embedded in Chapter 133. It’s complicated. Unfortunately, Cortázar’s incomprehensible and atrociously written novel could be read upside-down in any order, and the reader would still want to drill his brain out with a corkscrew. The book revolves around various Argentinean characters who drink the South American beverage maté every few minutes and stage laughable intellectual discourses that make absolutely no sense to anyone human.I’m surprised to see so many glowing reviews of this novel. The prose isn’t merely dense, it’s literally gibberish. The writing is of such a rambling and undisciplined style, it boggles the mind to see what kind of pretentious waffle writers could get away with in the 1960s. Viva la revolution, indeed. I do have patience for intellectual, challenging books, but post-Joycean texts such as this represent the most damaging and tedious excesses of postmodernism. The end result is an elitist parlour game: making the reader sweat over the author’s every sentence, scavenging for meaning in empty corners.A Partial Retraction, April 2012:This review makes me wince slightly, since it clearly bears the petulant stamp of the defeated reader, grasping for points of comparison and coming up with clumsy examples. Joyce? No. Too simple. I should insert the novel between more receptive thighs, i.e. the sixties Beats writers, with shades of Marquez-tinged magical realism. Seems more apt, if I recall rightly. Form-wise, this is closer to the structural games of the Oulipo than Joyce’s complete annihilation of recognisable language as a means of literary transcendence. Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. I’m off for a cup of maté with my mates.
—MJ Nicholls
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.
—Nate D
"¿Cuál es tu libro favorito?" Te suele preguntar la gente que sabe muy bien que te gusta tanto leer que en tu cartera puede faltar el celular, o el peine, o el espejo, o el polvito iridiscente, pero jamás de los jamases va a faltar un libro (o dos). La verdad es que no tengo uno sólo, sino varios. Hay decenas de libros que de alguna manera u otra:a) me marcaron.b) me conmovieron.c) me cambiaron la vida.d) todas las anteriores de manera simultánea."¿Cuál es tu libro favorito?" Es la típica pregunta que un lector de pura cepa escucha una y otra vez, incansablemente, a lo largo de su vida. No podría elegir uno, la verdad. Se me complicaría mucho. Ponéle que amo quince o veinte libros con locura, a tal punto que las páginas ya están gastadas de tantas releídas que se tuvieron que bancar, y encima en cada una de esas relecturas me siguieron:a) marcandob) conmoviendoc) cambiándome la vidad) todas las anteriores de manera simultánea."No, dale. ELEGÍ UNO. TENÉS que tener un libro favorito"Mirá, la verdad que no. Es muy difícil responder a esa pregunta. Tal vez hoy, con todas las cosas que me están pasando, me siento más cerca de Eduardo Galeano que de Isabel Allende. Tal vez, así como el año pasado me obsesioné con Murakami, el mes que viene me lea de un tirón la bibliografía completa de Sábato. Hoy por hoy, cada vez que leo a Diana Gabaldon termino moqueando. Pero nuestras reacciones, sensaciones y vulnerabilidades no son rígidas, ni perpetuas, ni inmutables. Los seres humanos atravesamos continuas transformaciones. 'Lo único permanente es el cambio' en todos y cada uno de los aspectos de la vida. a) Lo que en un momento de tu vida te marcó, tal vez hoy te deja impasibleb) Lo que hace cinco años te conmovió, quizás ahora no te mueve un pelo.c) Ése libro/autor/capítulo/párrafo/frase que en cierta época te cambió la vida hoy quizás te parezca insulso. d) Todas las anteriores de manera simultánea. Por eso. Realmente elegir UN libro favorito me parece un absurdo. Sí existen libros absolutamente significativos en mi vida. Y Rayuela es EL mejor ejemplo que se me viene a la mente (y al alma...)Rayuela es el libro de mi vida. Cada vez que lo leo (y créanme que lo leí tantas veces que puedo recitar capítulos completos de memoria) siento que me reencuentro con un viejo amigo del que hace años que no se nada y con el que perdimos completamente el contacto, pero sin embargo y a pesar de esto, todo entre nosotros vuelve a fluir. A ser completamente hermoso y natural. Porque Rayuela y yo nos llevamos increíblemente bien. La química nunca decae. El entendimiento es mutuo. La llama es eterna. Para mi es un gozo, un placer y un privilegio caminar por las callejas de París en busca de la Maga y su paraguas destartalado. Volver una y otra vez a esta historia es algo que voy a hacer hasta que tenga noventa años y me tengan que editar una impresión especial con tipografía tamaño Mamut, jajaja. Amo con toda mi alma a Cortázar. Amo con toda mi alma a 'Rayuela'. Rayuela es una parte mía, de mi personalidad, de mi historia, de mi alma y de mi ser. No sé si será mi 'libro favorito'. Pero sí sé que es mi historia más querida.
—Daniela Medina
