“Autobahn”
by Hugo Hamilton
from the September 23, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
I am not sure if I’ve ever heard of Hugo Hamilton before, though it looks like he’s been publishing — plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs — since 1990.
Here is how this story begins:
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow. Chunks of gray sludge clung to the wheel guards of trucks. Tires ripped along the road. I had my thumb out. I was wearing an overcoat that I’d got from an uncle who was twice my size; it fit me like a house. When a car pulled up, it felt like a bright moment of luck, but then the driver got out and pointed a gun at me.
That’s captured me!
I hope you’re all starting a good week, and I look forward to reading and commenting on this story. Please feel welcome to join in!
“He asked for proof of identity, but I had none with me.” This line really puts the reader right into the heart of the story.
And so “Autobahn” is a compelling short narrative in a number of ways. The very name of this internationally well-known expressway is like a metaphor for the huge world “highway of life” that everyone travels upon once born.
Life, at least in this story, doesn’t seem friendly with all the cold, very white snow all around and then the unexpected inciting incident abruptly spilled or spelled out to the reader in the hitch-hiking protagonist being stopped by the police officer.
One can be mistaken for a foreigner at any time. Or sometimes one is lucky and never deemed an outsider.
The situation one is born into is so random sometimes.
The scourge of domestic terrorism is how easily a very domestic person could be easily mistaken for a terrorist and vice versa.
But it’s great how there is tentative resolution at the end of the story. How there can be saving grace and still be nice people in the world.
And the Doors song at the end is perfect. As though it’s always okay to maybe be an outsider because one is still part of the larger painting or tapestry of all life.
A compelling story, but I never would have thought of anything like the “highway of life”!
The story interested me for the situation, which I personally relate to, up to a point. Hitchhiking all over the US and Canada throughout the 1970s and ’80s, I was stopped many times, with varying degrees of hostility or civility, though not at gunpoint, and never stopped in Canada. I was never arrested, nor even fined, only questioned and warned, so had to move on and take my chances. I never drove until 1989.
Nowadays, I’ve only hitched a few times, in my local area, when my car was out of commission. No police ever bother me. I don’t know how it is elsewhere. Any comments on that?