TURBULENCE

TURBULENCE

By David Szalay

“So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go
‘Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go” – John Denver

Turbulence is a group of situational vignettes, each story grabbing the hand of the preceding one through a common character, until at last the book circles round back to the first. The stories span the globe, as one person in each flies to another country to weather bits of the human turbulence we experience in our lives.

I thought this was a lovely book, cleverly written, but not in a flippant way. I liked the chapter titles; they were simply arrival and destination airport codes, showing locations where the characters began and where they went. The book was short; I finished it easily in a couple of hours, and I want to re-read it to uncover the nuances that I may have missed, and also just to absorb the characters a little more fully.

I was taken by how much of life the author, David Szalay, was able to put into such a spare novel. The first and final chapters were even more intricate than I realized as I now think more about them, with the child-parent-child relationships the author ties together. Yes, I definitely will re-read this!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an ARC of the book in exchange for my honest review.

Reviewed May 2019