A restless Argentine intellectual wanders the streets of Paris, haunting jazz clubs and debating art with a loose circle of bohemians, searching for a metaphysical passage to the other side of experience. Cortázar published this novel with an invitation: read it straight through, or follow an alternate sequence that hops between chapters, folding the book back on itself like a game that keeps changing its rules. Written in the white heat of the Latin American literary explosion, it is a novel about the inadequacy of novels, a love story that destroys its own lovers, and a philosophical inquiry conducted through bebop, sex, madness, and tenderness. Every reading rearranges it. No two passages through its pages arrive at the same place.