Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, translated by Anne McLean in 2007, 1983

Every once in a while it is a pleasure to read a light, playful book as an antidote to all the Proust and Sartre in the world. 'Autonauts of the Cosmoroute' is just such a book. It has been a long time since I have read such a light, charming book. The premise is a simple one: Cortázar and his partner Carol Dunlop to travel from Paris to Marseilles in their red VW camper van, but instead of whistling along the highway as many of us would, they decided to stop at every parking facility: all sixty-six of them. They set themselves a rule: their first stop of the day was for a leisurely lunch, and the second (usually ten kilometres further on) was their stop for the night.

It is a simple idea that transforms the thought of motorway travel. None of us has the luxury of spending thirty-three days on a trip that should take two or three.

Most French drivers do it in one long slog. My father-in-law used to stop long enough to refuel, and my wife as a child remembers the opportunity for going to the toilet  was limited to the time it took to 'faire le plein' (fill up the tank). Julio was a short story writer and his wife a photographer, so they were in the privileged position of being able to stop, get out the garden chairs, listen to the birds singing and cook a good meal.

Cortázar wrote with humour and charm. This little travelogue was his last book: he was sixty-eight in the summer of 1982 and although candid about his health, he must have known that his time left was limited. He died two years later. A strand that weaves itself through the whole book is the delight and being alive: the taste of peaches, the sound of the skylark, and the joy of waking up each morning. He certainly seems to have been a man who appreciated the gift of his life.

To say Julio (nicknamed El Lobo, the wolf) and his partner Carol (La Osita, the little bear) were eccentric was an understatement. They shared a playful fantasy life with a vocabulary all of its own, in which Highway repairmen were spies sent to disrupt their Bohemian endeavours, and their little VW camper was a red dragon named Fafner, after Wagner. The details of each rest stop were meticulously noted (except when they forgot) and the quality of each lay-by is scientifically analysed. The shade provided by trees is a particular vote-winner (1982 seemed to be a particularly hot summer in southern France), as is the opportunity to drive a good distance from the hum of the motorway. Trucks with refrigeration units that park nearby and whir away all night brought the pair almost to distraction.

They were well organised: in a time before mobile telephones and the internet, they had to plan carefully for friends to meet them with supplies unobtainable at roadside shop like fresh bread and fruit. They arranged two such meetings with helpful friends and partied on each occasion.

The book is a surreal piece of writing. At times Cortázar rambles off to the backwoods of his mind. It is a largely pleasant place. His ponderings revealed a deep thinker, a sensitive soul and an imagination so vivid the writing would be more at home in 1967 than the early eighties. He was Argentinian, and based in Paris, but for British readers it is interesting to see that he too thought the Falklands / Malvinas escapade a folly.

Another quirky twist is that some of the writing is quite erotically charged - there are musings on the secret lives of drivers and passengers, and a few interesting little side-daydreams that perhaps a more private writer might have buried. There are also a nigh-on incomprehensible series of letters that are only loosely linked to the main exploits of the couple.

France in 1982 was a very analogue place - if that is the correct word to describe the opposite of digital. Flicking back to the photographs you are reminded how distinctive each car manufacturer was, and how much the world has changed. We have quickly become accustomed to carrying all the music we will ever need on phones, and every book on an e-reader.

In 1982 Cortázar and Dunlop sustained themselves with the few books that would fit in their camper van, and some symphonies on cassettes. They recorded their adventures on two lightweight portable typewriters. If you were to repeat the journey today, I am sure everything could be held on one device, and you would never be too far from an internet connection to check facts and upload your thoughts to the waiting world. Luddite that I am, I am nostalgic for such a world.

This book shows how observation of the mundane came become extraordinary if you give it time to develop in the mind. We have many luxuries in the twenty-first century, but the time to sit and watch seems for many not to be one of them.

This summer, whilst whizzing south-west (his journey was south-east) I shall try to notice more, and perhaps at a dreary rest-stop raise a glass to Julio Cortázar, the man who helped me to see things a little more intimately.

A Strange Little Book

The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell, Longmans, 1965 (out of print)

In recent months I have been looking to broaden my reading horizons and uncover lost treasure, so I have tried to keep to a self-imposed reading rule of at least one book as mentioned in ‘Slightly Foxed’, the lovely readers’ quarterly.

The first on my list of exploration was ‘The House of Elrig’, the autobiographical account of the early life of Gavin Maxwell.

Gavin Maxwell falls into a special category of the Previously Famous. Looking back into any decade you are likely to uncover writers whose fame has not lasted. Do you remember the storm of controversy and excitement caused by ‘Riders’ byJilly Cooper? Yet she hardly gets a mention now. A particularly well-thumbed copy was in circulation among the adolescent males of South East Essex – and it wasn’t the plot we were interested in. I also recall piles upon piles of Alistair MacLean novels in my grandfather’s house, and little has come of all that writing other than a tame adaptation of ‘The Guns of Navarone’.

So it is with Gavin Maxwell. He was a leader in what I can only label as ‘wildlife stories’, which were an escape for those who wished to have boyish adventures and yet had to stay home and learn how to do quadratic equations. His most important book in this style was ‘Ring of Bright Water’, about a smooth-coated otter that Maxwell repatriated from an adventure in Iraq. It was made into a feature film in 1969, the year that Maxwell died.

‘The House of Elrig’ is dated, but in a pleasant and nostalgic way. Maxwell was born into privilege (his uncle was the Duke of Northumberland) but also difficulty (his father was killed in the First World War when Gavin was three months old). He spent his childhood in a series of smaller English Public Schools, from which he dreamed of escape.

Escape was, of course, back to the family home at Elrig in Scotland. He dreamed of returning for Enid-Blyton-like escapades outdoors, doing what 1930s children liked to do: stealing birds’ eggs, adopting pet owls, eating sandwich picnics, and learning how to shoot.

It is precisely this chronicling of a childhood, which seems so odd to us now, which gives the book its charm. I knew very little about how the children of the wealthy grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. Maxwell details all the eccentricities, characters and foibles of a time before the darkness of the Second World War descended. It is, in fact, lashings of ginger beer and shooting rabbits.

I will not give the game away, but will say that ‘The House of Elrig’ was a pre-cursor to a very colourful and sadly short life. Maxwell did not live to old age, and left no children other than a rather strange adoption of the late Terry Nutkins, he of BBC Wildlife fame.

A strange little book indeed.