Rayuela is, according to the own author, an attempt of negation of the everyday reality .One novel able to be read skipping
the final chapters or including these brief fragments of Literature that are in their majority of a playful character to which the writer was very fan.
Horacio Oliveira is the antihero of this novel: a cold, cynical and ironic being who defends himself of a world that becomes a chaos of Kantian sensations to which he can´t find a possible order, no matter how hard he tries to give it, time and time again.
The scene of the first part of the novel is Paris, where the author lived most of his life, which makes us think that perhaps Oliveira is a negative of the writer who pronounced badly the letter "r". While he is in the French capital, Horacio maintains a peculiar loving relationship with "la Maga". All along what it tries is to free himself of its love that chains him and of the son of
hers. What he looks for in fact is to give up is everything that has to do with ordinary life. He lives lost in metaphysical rivers, as “La Maga” calls them, and seeing, or rather, thinking things that are beyond the concrete reality. It is in this first part that appears a series of improbable personages that maintain dialogues of intellectual and aesthetic order such as: philosophy, painting, Blues and the Jazz. Oliveira gets lost in the streets of Paris with facility and intentionally, sometimes wanting to meet by chance with “La Maga”, and other times looking for some event that would give some sense to his life, at least by moments. So it is the case of the incident with the old piano player, in where in fact what he looks for it is to know if he still has something of mercy towards the human beings.
In the second part it travels towards Buenos Aires, of where the author was native, perhaps looking for ”La Maga”, to whom had left in Paris. But he does not find her and this is it what makes him become hopeless more and more to the knowledge than perhaps he lost the only person who loved him like was. Nevertheless it does not attribute his desperation to this and every time he divorces more of the world. In Buenos Aires he meets with an old friend who never left the city and that paradoxically is called Traveler. This man could be himself if he had never left his place of origin.
In the end we see a totally deranged Oliveira, on the brink of madness suicide.
And if we continued reading the prescindibles chapters we realise that he decides to live a common life, and to adapt to the reality of every day of a way that is now perhaps too extreme.