The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop
reviewed by Danielle Dutton

Trans. Anne McLean. Archipelago Books, 2008. 354 pp. Paper: $14.00.

“Rest areas, monotonous? To us they seem more diverse all the time, we feel and experience them like microcosms where our red capsule touches down each day as if on undiscovered little planets”: thus write Julio Cortazar and his partner Carol Dunlop towards the end of their charming travel guide to the Autroute du Sud and its rest stops, which they slowly traversed in 1982 in their red Volkswagen Combi Van named Fafner (a.k.a. “the Dragon”). The plan is simple: they will drive from Paris to Marseille without once leaving the highway, stopping at two rest stops per day, the second of which will serve as their home for the night. On the road for less than thirty minutes at a time, they spend most of their days on flowered lawn chairs (“the Florrid Horrors”) reading and writing, eating and drinking, and making pseudo-scientific observations on the flora and fauna they encounter (trinkets at service stations, construction workers, caterpillars, golden retrievers). The livability of rest stops, we quickly learn, varies wildly from one to another. Our travelers deal with this constant fluctuation as best they can, and these minor inconveniences become the adventures of their journey. With no high-speed chases or international intrigue, each morning, each carefully recorded meal (“Lunch: corned beef, chickpea salad, cheese, cherries.”), each soaring skylark takes on greater significance; when attended to, these small morsels of daily life, the things others rush past at seventy miles per hour, expand to fill whatever space the couple will allow them. Cortazar and Dunlop are on the run from a persistent “gloom” at home in Paris; they’re looking to escape their “demons.” But rather than escape to some exotic island, they escape to an enchanted quotidian, into another dimension within our own, sharing the same ground but of another temporal field: “a land of great silence, a land of time that lengthens and nevertheless moves on unnoticed.” And it works. “Outside of time,” they tell us, away from ringing telephones and doctors and deadlines, they “knew for the first and last time what absolute happiness was.” But as this happy claim intimates, there is lurking sadness here. So while the outcome of events seems inevitable (Paris to Marseille), nevertheless, one feels a need to accompany these travelers to the very end, to see them safely to their final destination.