Horacio Oliveira moves through bohemian Paris and then Buenos Aires, searching for some center that keeps receding. Cortázar published this in 1963 with instructions that it could be read either sequentially or by hopping between chapters in a different order. The novel is about reading itself, about the search for meaning through art and love and jazz, about the impossibility of arrival. It defined the Latin American Boom alongside García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. The prose moves like improvisation.