Just found this fantastic excerpt from Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Causeway on Fiction Magazine’s website. Swofford mentioned Cortazar’s book Hopscotch as one of the books that were formative in his development as a writer…that and the smokin’ hot cover of the Vintage edition.
The writing here is hilarious, smart and just “off” enough to make it tickle my funny bone. Now I really do have to read more of his work, sometimes authors keep popping into your life for a reason & you don’t know why until you read their work and feel like you’ve found some long-lost Uncle (or aunt) who is just like you and suddenly you think you might not be an alien baby after all.
This section of Autonauts is about a motoring trip that takes on the dimensions of an expedition.
An excerpt of the excerpt:
The plan becomes concrete
In the autumn of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game:
1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the autoroute.
2. Explore each one of the rest areas, at the rate of two per day, spending the night in the second one without exception.
3. Carry out scientific topographical studies of each rest area, taking note of all pertinent observations.
4. Taking our inspiration from the travel tales of the great explorers of the past, write the book of the expedition (methods to be determined).
By common agreement, and given that neither of us is a masochist, we decided that we will also be allowed to take full advantage of anything we can find along the freeway: restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.
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