Jorge Enrique Lage: La Autopista: The Movie Freeway- La Movie)

The latest addition to my website is Jorge Enrique Lage‘s La Autopista: The Movie Freeway- La Movie. Set in mid-twenty-first century Havana, this surrealist/absurdist novel recounts the adventures of the unnamed narrator and his friend El Autista (meaning the Autistic Person) around the massive Freeway linking Havana to the USA. The two men have a series of absurd adventures, including involvement with Seminoles searching every Hard Rock Café for some missing but unspecified item, involving Philip K. Dick and the Grand Unified Theory, finding a prehistoric skeleton, giant Transformer-like machines fighting a hurricane called Katrina who looks like a blow-up doll, performing an on-the-spot heart transplant and meeting various US and Cuban cultural icons. The two men are filming a documentary film of the freeway, whch, of course, has a traffic jam. The book is great fun but clearly not to be taken too seriously.

Leave a Reply