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Writing about music is hard. Listening is one of those left brain functions that the right brain doesn't really understand or know what to make of. Most writers slap a make-do bridge between thinking and feeling, telling you, for instance, what other music the piece they're listening to resembles, or listing factual information such as what instruments are playing, what key or time signature the piece is in or (the ultimate fall-back) what the lyrics say. Very few capture the essence of the piece they're listening to, the visceral response that people listen to music for in the first place. Julio Cortázar, perhaps the greatest of all Argentine novelists, was one of those few, and he did it effortlessly, humblingly and repeatedly in his massive novel Hopscotch.
Hopscotch starts in Paris at an undetermined mid-20th century time and follows Argentine emigre Horacio Oliveira as he balances a fascination with intellectual discussion with real life concerns like his lovely mistress La Maga and her ailing infant son. It is in the scenes with his Bohemian circle -- "the Club", which gathers failed writers, ceramicists, music lovers and philosophers -- that we read example after example of superlative music writing.
Consider this passage, describing Bix Beiderbecke and Eddie Lang's 1927 recording of "I'm Coming Virginia". Cortázar was an amateur jazz trumpeter as well as an extraordinary writer, and you can tell.
"...suddenly ... a cornet broke loose from the rest of the group and blew the first notes of the melody, landing on them as on a diving board. Bix took off with everything he had, and the clear sketch was inscribed on the silence as if it had been scratched there. Two corpses sparred fraternally, clinching and breaking, Bix and Eddie Lang (whose real name was Salvatore Massaro) played catch with I'm Coming Virginia, and I wonder where Bix is buried, thought Oliveira, and Eddie Lang, how many miles apart are their two nothings that one future night in Paris were to fight, guitar against cornet, gin against bad luck, jazz."
Or this about Louis Armstrong's "Yellow Dog Blues:"
"and then the trumpet's flaming up, the yellow phallus breaking the air and having fun, coming forward and drawing back and towards the end three ascending notes, pure hypnotic gold, a perfect pause where all the swing of the world was beating in an intolerable instant, and then the supersharp ejaculation slipping and falling like a rocket in the sexual night."
This kind of stuff is inspiring for anyone who's trying to write about music, but also daunting. It makes it very hard to pound out sentences like "it sounds kind of like Pearl Jam, but louder" with a clear conscience.
Ultimately, Cortázar rejects the empty intellectualism of Oliveira's circle, but not before skewering avant-garde classical music in one of the funniest sections of the book. Oliveira, who may or may not be getting tired of La Maga, wanders into a concert which includes the fictional Berthe Trépat's "Delibes/Saint Saens Synthesis", described as follows: "The prophetic syncretism was not long in revealing its secret, even for a layman like Oliveira: three measures of Le Rouet d'Omphale were followed by four more from Les Filles de Cadix, then her left hand offered "Mon couer s'ouvre a ta voix," bells from Lakmé..."
and so on, as the audience thins from a handful to finally only Oliveira. I laughed when I read this perfect rendering of self-satisfied experimentalism; it is not hard to imagine the album turning up in the Splendid mailbox.
After a misadventure with Madame Trépat, Oliveira returns to La Maga and the Club in a prolonged passage that shows how heartless his group's intellectual swordplay truly was. La Maga's son Rocamodour has been very ill and dies quietly in a dark corner of the room where the Club sits listening to jazz and talking. Oliveira and some of his companions, it turns out, know that the child has died, but say nothing until La Maga goes to give him his medicine. A minute before, Oliveira and his friend Gregovorius have been arguing about the paintings of Rembrandt. Now, as La Maga's hands "clutch(ed) an indifferent ashen little doll who trembled and shook without conviction", another club member remarks "Oh, shit, we should have prepared her for it." This scene is effectively the end of the Club and the end of La Maga -- who, it seems likely but is never confirmed, drowns herself in the Seine shortly thereafter.
Oliveira leaves Paris and returns to Buenos Aires, where he reconnects with a childhood friend named the Traveler, a kind of double who has done everything Oliveira has not -- married, gotten a job, stayed home. The wife, Talita, becomes the focal point of a strange triangle. The threesome works first for a circus, then later at an insane asylum, as Oliveira gradually begins to equate Talita with the lost La Maga. I found these later sections of the book interesting, but much tougher to read than the Paris sections.
Finally, there is a long appendix with "expendable" chapters, each ending with a number that indicates which chapter comes next. Essentially, if you want to experience these chapters in order, you have to read the book over. They are mostly philosophical asides, not nearly as interesting as the main body of the book, but they do force you to return to the mesmerizing prose of the early pages.
It's ironic that Cortázar is so good at describing ephemera, yet seems to discount it by the end of the book. The metaphor of Hopscotch, which appears throughout, argues for simplicity and realness rather than intellectual argument as the key to happiness. He writes, "A pebble and a toe, what La Maga had known so well and he much less well, and the Club more or less well...would show the narrow path to Heaven without need of Vedanta or Zen or collected eschatologies, yes, reach Heaven with kicks, get there with a pebble."
I don't really buy it, though. Neither the pebble nor the heaven it leads to are ever as compellingly described as the jazz, modern literature and philosophy they supersede. You can't help wondering if Cortázar, who died in 1984, would really want to go to heaven if there was no Bix Beiderbecke up there.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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About the Publisher:
Pantheon is an imprint of Random House.
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