Julio Cortazar. The first of the "golden trinity" Latin American prose of the mid-twentieth century Cortazar-Borges-Marquez. A writer who balances on the edge of reality and fantasy, magical realism and surrealism, an unsurpassed master of Spanish-language literature, who does not fit into the narrow framework of definitions and genres.'A game of hopscotch'. The book that literary criticism has traditionally been compared to a 'glass bead Game' of Hermann Hesse and 'Ulysses'James Joyce.A book that is considered a kind of standard of magical realism.'A game of hopscotch'. Text within the text. A novel in which mystical revelations are subject to strict classification, and ordinary events take on a deep, multi-level meaning.A book without which there would not have been not only Fowles and Coelho, but even the' late ' Marquez!