A literary revelation

When we were leaving San Francisco, Mike (who is subletting our apartment) gave me this book, Rayuela (Hopscotch - in translation), by Julio Cortazar. I almost left it behind in LA X: I'd never heard of Cortazar, and the book was large, dense, and lacking in all but the outlines of a narrative structure. But there were certain little moments that kept me going. Even though I didn't like the somewhat nihilistic protagonist very much, I liked the way his mind worked and the fun he had with language (ie Cortazar). I also liked the fact that he was writing about places I was walking through in Buenos Aires. This morning I finished the book - as this usually sunny loft few blocks from Plaza Cortazar was plastered in rain and shaken by donner and blitzen (odd that the Norse/German words for thunder and lightning have now become cute cartoons on spindly legs - but I enjoy the image of these enraged reindeeritos flying into the window).
Here are a couple things I liked from the book:

"Explanation is a well-dressed mistake."
The main character says this -- he's joking around (well, it's hard to tell when he is ever serious) -- all the same I like it because it captures an idea in a few words that Thomas Kuhn spun into a whole book (published the year before actually).

This next one takes a bit more explanation: A character (Traveler) is reading the works of a (fictional I hope) Uruguayan philosopher name Ceferino who has this Utopian vision for reorganizing the world. According to his scheme each country gets 45 national corporations (like the EPA, FBI, FCC, that sort of thing). Number 25 is the National Corporation of Hospitals and Related Houses, and includes, "all hospitals of all types, workshops for repairs and adjustments, houses for the curing of hides, stables for the curing of horses, dental clinics, barber shops, houses for the pruning of plants, houses for the arrangement of intricate legal forms, etc. ...
"There is is," Traveler said. "A break that proves Ceferino's perfect central healthiness ... there's no reason to accept the order of things the way daddy hands them to us. Cefe thinks that the fact that something is being repaired unites a dentist and intricate legal forms; accidents are just as valuable as essences ... But it's pure poetry, boy. Cefe is breaking the mental crust, as somebody or other said, and he's beginning to see the world from a different angle. Of course this is what they call being batty."
Beth helpfully suggested (when I told her about this business with the mental crust) that whenever one is tempted to say "paradigm shift" you should instead say "breaking the mental crust." It's a metaphor you can actually visualize. Incidentally, Kuhn was the one that popularized the term paradigm  and it's shiftiness.