Una errancia motorizada: Asfalto de Luis Chaves

Abstract

In this article, the author analyzes the representation of wandering during a road trip in Asfalto (2006), the novel by the Costa Rican writer Luis Chaves. Throughout the car journey of a couple in crisis, the narrative focuses on fragmentary everyday scenes that refer to a displacement marked by the lack of direction and apparent immobility. Like a road movie, the novel focuses on the experience of the journey over the destination and uses visual language and references to photography to add different temporal layers to the story. In tune with wandering, the use of digression as an anti-narrative strategy blurs and deflects the story toward the intimacy of the everyday, and suggests a latent content beyond the text. In this textual wandering, the novel represents the car trip both as an instance of appropriation and creation of an affective landscape, as well as a process of dissolution of identities.