"Labyrinth - More Hip Than Paradise"
(may be spoilers here and there)

Hopscotch has the appearance of an extreme modern narrative experiment, but the architecture is almost simple: the first two parts are the double-sided narration focused on Horacio (with loose-ends, unlike a traditional narration, but with little deviations from a certain subjective realism), the last part is a body of numerous and - most of them - small chapters which function less like large foot notes and more like "extra content" for those who want to find out more from the universe of these characters... which means reading the whole book, chapter-to-chapter or - better yet, albeit tiring for your hands - in the "hopscotch" manner, will be a drag if reading about some hipsters loungin' around and having artsy conversations in good Parisian fashion doesn't sound already exciting... It's interesting though that, unlike (say) Ulysses, there are less actual eccentricities, full blown experiments: there's just one chapter in which lines can only be read logically by jumping from 1 to 3, 2 to 4 and so on (but reading the lines in a linear fashion gives birth to interesting coincidences)... and then, if you use the "hopscotch" method, there's one chapter that's skipped (55) and, in the ending, it seems like you're left in an "infinite loop", so there isn't a definitive chapter (but you can simply remove the "vinyl").

Alright, it's not a novel, but a finger in front of the idea of a novel as a solid construction that makes sense and can be easily read. The difference is that this (sort of, but still not entirely) anti-novel wants to be as labyrinthine as the experience of Horacio & co. (and, yeah, life isn't "composed" like a regular novel, death doesn't always mean a thing - and, here, the narration is quite obviously just a frame). However, there is an actual development in the relation between the characters, the timeline is linear in much greater degree than it seems and, at the end, it's not like you can absolutely open the book at random and read without having a different experience (at least from the one intended through "hopscotch"). But the idea of the experiment remains - call it "pretentious", I name it at least interesting.

The narration is rather slow-paced and as fragmented as it can be (though the few chapters that are relatively long were exciting as well), but I have enormously enjoyed the style, the constant irony and name-dropping - and I like a lot these vintage Parisian hipsters... OK, I guess even I can't help but read such a book by identifying myself... "objective" reading is out of the question. I might as well go rating this 5-star as it manages to accurately depict how I feel and see things now. 7 years ago, I would have found this too littered with mundane things, in 7 years I will probably find this too "juicy". But... ( )