In the post-covid era, with its pandemic life transformation, fleeting encounters and unforeseen trips seem like smaller utopias of interrelation with others of our species. A strange edge of the most septic suspicion keeps the mask away from any non-cohabiting interlocutor.
And that's why a story like this of David szalay It returns us to a new desired normality, to that necessary shared space despite everything. It used to happen on trips to any part that strangers stopped being strangers to end up becoming suggestive characters with whom to chat as if writing unsuspected chapters of our life, giving us randomly that pointed to adventure because that is how we wanted it, deep down, those of us who we encouraged to exchange those greetings and something else like sparks that ignited new things.
The current narrative sometimes needs a break from overexploited genres to tune in with other more literary waves. intimate, existentialists even. Because we look for what we are looking for in reading, we are always surprised when in addition to evasion we find that something else, that feeling that indeed, great adventures are lived in books.
During a turbulent flight, a woman talks to the man sitting next to her on the plane; that man returns home with tragic news that has also impacted another stranger. A pilot meets a journalist one night whose life undergoes slight changes before heading to the airport. Each of these trips, chained together, opens the door to other characters, to other lives, to other worlds.
On the journeys from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, Toronto, Delhi or Doha, whether to visit lovers, siblings, elderly parents or no one at all, the twelve protagonists of this work experience the full range of human emotions, from loneliness to love and, although sometimes they do not know it, they interact with others in a fleeting, decisive and electrifying way.
You can now buy the novel «Turbulences», by David Szalay, here:
