High flying turmoils

“Life is not a joke”Szalay seems to be repeating the phrase in the book often and uses plot twists and clear cut moral dilemmas to hold reader’s attention.

 

Turbulence is book of 12 stories based around the plane journeys exploring the turmoil caused by physical and emotional distance. 

The principal character of each of the 12 stories is a minor figure from preceding one and the final story loops back to a character from thre first one.

David Sazalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto to Delhi, to Doha enroute to see lovers and parents, children and siblings or nobody at all.

The stories throws light on the character’s inability to communicate their losses and fears to those close to them.

Air travel narrows the physical distance but doesn’t seem to help with the emotion.

In the opening story a woman visiting her middle aged son, who is being treated for prostrate cancer, collapses on a turbulent flight to Spain. In the second , one of her fellow traveller s fails to see that his driver is trying to avoid giving him some sort of life altering news. In the third, a witness to the life altering event unburdens himself to an uncomprehending fellow pilot, who in the fourth has a one-night stand with a Brazilian woman.

 Szalay juxtapose experiences of prosperity and poverty in complicated ways.

Turbulence by David Szalay, Jonathan Cape £9.99, 136 pages