Hopscotch is a book that doesn't act like a book. In fact, it's a novel that explodes the idea of what a novel is! Cortazar refers to this quality of self-referentiality in the book when one of his characters talks about using the brain to destroy itself in a form of intellectual suicide:
The scorpion stabbing itself in the neck, tired of being a scorpion but having to have recourse to its own scorpioness in order to do away with itself as a scorpion.
The above quote is the spookiest damn thing I've read in a long time.