Flights takes readers through space and time

Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, the world's largest award for translation, which is what caused me to pick it up. It was translated Jennifer Croft, about whom I will be writing in another review. For now, I'm going to stick to Flights and its author.

Tokarcuzk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual who has been described in Poland as one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors of her generation. Flights won the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize, in 2008. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw and has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works.  

According to my source—Wikipedia—Tokarcuzk is a leftist, a vegetarian, an atheist, and a feminist. She has been criticized by some groups in Poland as unpatriotic, anti-Christian, and a promoter of eco-terrorism. She has denied the allegations, and has described herself as a "true patriot." She said that groups criticizing her are xenophobic and damage Poland's international reputation.

In a New Yorker article ("Past Master: An experimental novelist and the battle for Poland's national narrative"), Ruth Franklin writes,  Tokarczuk's role, "as she sees it, is to force her readers to examine aspects of history – their own or their nation's – that they would rather avoid. She has become, she says, a 'psychotherapist of the past.'" Which brings us to Flights.

The 403 pages have no chapter breaks. Rather, subheads break up the text and change the subject: "Here I am," "The world in your head," "Your head in the world," "Syndrome," "Cabinet of curiosities," "Seeing is knowing," "Seven years of trips," "Guidance from Cioran". . . . 

The text after each subhead may be as short as a paragraph or a story several pages long. It may be written in first or third person. It may be a present-day observation in the present tense or an historical fiction written in the past tense. Or it may be genuine history; did Chopin's sister smuggled his heart back to Poland? It may be set in France or Poland or Germany or the Netherlands or Russia or Italy or on an island off the Croatian coast. It may be set in an airport. She has several meditations on and writes about incidents in airports. 

The text may be autobiographical: "I was as waitress, a maid in an upscale hotel, and a nanny. I sold books. I sold tickets. I was employed in a small theater for one season to work in wardrobe, making it through that long winter ensconced backstage amidst heavy costumes, satin capes, and wigs. Once I'd finished my studies, I worked as a teacher, as a rehab counselor, and—most recently—in a library. Whenever I managed to save any money, I would be on my way again."

The text may be creative non-fiction: The first thing that caught my eye upon arriving in the Eternal City was the beautiful black salesmen of handbags and wallets. I bought a little red coin purse, because my last one had been stolen in Stockholm. The second thing was the stalls laden with postcards—as a matter of fact, you could leave it at that, spending the rest of your time in the shade on the banks of the Tiber, perhaps having a glass of wine later on in one of the expensive little cafes."

The text may be fiction: "She's been packing for days. Her things lie in piles on the rug in their room. To get to the bed she steps between them, wading in among the stacks of shirts and underwear and balled-up socks, trousers folded neatly along the crease, and a couple of books for the road, the novels everyone's been talking about that she has not had time to read." (This story with its bland beginning is almost worth the price of the book. Fortunately, so are several others.)

One might read Flights as collection of stories only loosely connected to one another with themes that range—as I read them—from the unknowability of another person to the persistence of memory to the impact (in the sense of crash) of technology on human life.

The thread that ties all this diversity together of course is the author. Flights is Tokarczuk's cabinet of curiosities, stories, incidents, anecdotes she's collected in her travels and has put on display.  We readers are fortunate she has done so.

Take the green road on a rewarding journey

Anne Enright's 2015 novel The Green Road, is the story of an Irish family, Rosaleen Madigan and her four children; Constance, Dan, Emmet, and Hanna. 

The first chapter is set in 1980 in Ardeevin, County Clare, an invented town, and told from twelve-year-old Hanna's point of view. We are introduced to the family and the crisis when Dan announces that he wants to be a priest, sending Rosaleen to her bed in tears.

The next chapter is dated 1991, sent in New York, and is Dan's. He has barely admitted he's gay and we're in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. This chapter, unlike Hanna's, is narrated by an unidentified observer; it begins, "We all thought Billy was with Greg . . . ." We who? But we're with Dan and his lovers.

Next it's 1997 in County Limerick and Constance's point of view. She is married to a successful businessman, has three children, and a lump in her breast. We learn about her relations with her husband, her parents, and her siblings as she visits a clinic to establish that the lump is benign.

Now it's 2002 in Ségou, Mali, and we're with Emmet. Ségou is a town and an urban commune in south-central Mali on the River Niger. (I had to look it up.) He and Alice, the woman he lives with, work for NGOs. "Alice was working on child mortality. Children were hard." Mali is also hard: "Thousands of miles on dust roads, and gravel roads, and potholed tarmac: roads that turned into rivers, or forest, or crowded marketplaces; roads you drove beside because the road was so bad."

In 2005, back in Ardeevin, we're with Rosaleen who is now seventy-six, her husband long dead. It's November and Rosaleen is writing Christmas cards. Dan in Canada, Emmet in Africa. Hanna in Dublin. Constance visits to drop off groceries. There is mother-daughter tension, and Rosaleen silently tells her: Lose some weight. "It was very aging—fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her." 

And after Constance has left and Rosaleen considers the house, the furnishings (her own parents' marriage bed remains upstairs), and the family, she decides to sell the house. Which brings the four children, spouses, grandchildren back to the house for Christmas.

It's a fraught holiday. Emmet "could see the next couple days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath [Constance's husband] was doing, what everything was worth these days—more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church—because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground."

One could read the first four chapters as short stories, linked by family connections but separate in time and place. They make up Part One, "Leaving." 

Part Two, "Coming Home," takes place in 2005, and the chapters are identified by location: Toronto, Dublin, Shannon Airport, County Dublin, The Green Road ("a real road that runs through the Burren in County Clare)—except when they're not.

Enright is able to somehow make Rosaleen and her children both individual and engaging—flawed but sympathetic, even Hanna who is an alcoholic and careless. Enright doesn't emphasize it, but 2005 was almost the peak of the Irish boom. She writes about significant events in her characters' lives with details that build and build and build until they come not to a conclusion, not to a comforting wrapping-up but a rich and satisfying ending. 

I'd like to know how she does it.  

Stories to challenge the idea of what makes a story

Flash fiction, according to Reedsy, "isn’t just a pared-down short story. Its focus isn’t necessarily on plot or characters, though it should still have both. Instead, the emphasis is placed on movement: each sentence must peel back a new layer that wasn’t visible at first. If a line (or even a word) doesn't progress the story or reveal more about a character, it probably won't belong in this medium."

A prose poem, according to the Poetry Foundation, is "prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry."

I'm starting with these two definitions in an effort to place many of the 22 stories in Christian Fennell's debut book, Torrents of Our Time. His website says that he writes literary fiction, essays, book reviews, and offers manuscript editing services to a select few clients. He was a columnist and the fiction editor of The Prague Review (which no longer has a website), and he has worked "as a screenwriter, commercial director, and as a producer and executive producer of extreme sports."

The stories are all short, some no more than a page and a half, which is sent me to the flash fiction definition. They are pared down to almost nothing, requiring the reader to fill in place, time, motivation, and more. Because Fennell offers so little, it is difficult to care about the people in the stories or what they do. 

The second story is titled "Introduction: Why I Write Fiction" and begins "How do we use this space—this time, you and I, best. What do we have to say? Because that's what it is, isn't it? Like a train on a track in a needle—running. Time. Understanding. This place and love. We all have this and we all want this." I do not understand "a train on a track in a needle," Nor do I understand what "this" is, and the second paragraph does not help me: "For the longest I couldn't write directly about mental health. I still can't, not really, not comfortably, and most certainly, not particularly well. Not as someone who suffers from it [mental health?], but as someone who lived and loved next to it."

Which is why I wonder if some of these pieces are really prose poems; they're not supposed to be read as short stories. They are incidents, anecdotes: Two brothers, drinking beer, sitting on "blocks of dried cracked white oak" decide a way to quit smoking is to have your mouth sewn shut. (Apparently it doesn't work.) A guy is traveling with too much cash and connects with a Russian girl. A girl meets a guy who is about to kidnap a cash machine. A guy builds a ship 43-feet bow to stern, 13-feet wide, 10-feet high in the middle of the Canadian prairie; it doesn't go anywhere.

Much of the dialogue is drastically pared down. Here in "On My Way to Sunday" are two women in a coffee shop (Fennell does not usually use quotation marks.)

Rebecca sipped her coffee. We've seen each other here now for how long?
I'm not sure?
Six or seven months? Perhaps longer?
Yes, at least that.
Why shouldn't we get to know one another? What is this world otherwise? Although, it is true, one must be careful. But only to a degree.
Yes, true.
You don't know who I am, do you?
You? No.
Jelinek.
That Jelinek?
Yes.
Oh.
And what is it you do?
Real estate.
That can be rewarding . . . .

According to the publishing acknowledgements in the back of the book, a slightly different version of that story was published in the HCE Review, a University College of Dublin literary magazine. In all, 15 of the 22 stories that appear in Torrents of Our Time have been published in international literary magazines.

While these are not to my taste, they are each interesting in its own way. Readers who are looking for something different—the literary magazine editors who first published the stories—will find it in Fennell's collection.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Last month I reviewed Anne Enright's most recent novel, Actress. I thought it was so terrific I looked up her novel The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I don't know what it was competing against, but it is, in my opinion, another terrific novel. 

The Gathering is narrated throughout by Veronica Hagarty, the 38-year-old wife of Tom, Dublin resident and native, mother of two girls, and a middle child among of a dozen Hagarty children. Her next-older brother Liam has killed himself by walking into the English Channel off Brighton, England, with his pockets filled with stones. Liam is eleven months older, which suggests something about the family, as does the mother's seven miscarriages. 

The clan gathers in Dublin for Liam's funeral, thus the title. And that, essentially, is the plot: Liam dies, Veronica collects his body, there's a funeral. So how does Enright fill 261 pages?

With razor-sharp details and an unrolling family history that is unique and universal. Examples chosen at random of the first: 

—She puts her hand on the bakelite handle [of the kettle] as the bubble thicken against the chrome, and she lifts it, still plugged in, splashing some water in to heat the pot. 

—I liked the curve to his top lip, and the way his suit hung open as he leaned over to talk to me, the dent in his chest as he stooped, the mixture of arrogance and inclination.

—We had a double act about Ernest's ordination, the horrible yellow soles of his feet as he lay prostrate on the altar, the sight of our mother, when all the voodoo was done, tottering across to dress him in his robes, and then later, at a sort of wedding reception, the two of them cutting the cake together, my brother and my mother, and kissing when it was done.

—[Her brother Mossie] didn't mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we like, but he would not abide the noise of the foot being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head.

The Gathering is a family chronicle, possibly true, possibly invented. It is a novel after all, so presumably it's all invented. Yet Enright does her best to persuade us that what we're reading is true. (I wonder how we would respond to the book if the author were 'Veronica Hagerty'?) Enright does this by questioning her own narrative. The book's first sentence reads, "I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen." We have an unreliable narrator who acknowledges up front that she may be unreliable.

Nevertheless, Veronica is engaging, dependable (she sows wild oats but is faithful to her husband), intelligent. With Liam's death, she is trying to make sense of her life as an individual, as a sister (Liam was her closest sibling, although by the end she could barely tolerate him), as a wife, and as a mother. "I do not want a different life," says Veronica at the book's end. "I just want to be able to live it, that's all."

Lucky are the readers who live with her for the 261 pages of The Gathering.