"'murky', 'obscure', 'hazy', 'hallucinatory', 'difficult', 'frustrating','incomprehensible', 'intriguing'"
-Publisher's Weekly
Elsewhere, News & Links
Five Reviews: Book 1
date: Jun 22, 2009
An excerpt from and link to a review I did for The Believer of Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.
Envision a journey informed by a playfully relaxed version of Zeno’s paradox on the impossibility of forward motion, and you’ll have a sense of the spirit presiding over Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. But only a sense, for if this collaborative volume, which recounts a thirty-three-day, 490-mile meander along the Paris-Marseille autoroute, at the carefully calculated rate of two rest stops per day, has an air of high jinks about it, the mad enterprise is also imbued with an air of sweet melancholy, a by-product of the mental and physical demons afflicting the two voyagers. Indeed, given that Canadian writer and activist Carol Dunlop died shortly after the trip was completed, and that Julio Cortazar—Argentinian author of vertiginous twentieth-century experimental classics such as Hopscotch—nearing the end of his own days, was left to finish the resultant book alone, it’s hard not to read a little too much sadness into the proceedings. Happily, though, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute resists projected pathos with the same vigor that “Fafner,” Cortazar and Dunlop’s fiery red VW camper, valiantly resisted the elements. To read the whole review click here
