![]() ![]() In this book, we are travellers who can only move forward and never look back. This is simultaneously a short story collection and a novel, so some mental adjustment is required until you get the hang of it. There is enough deftness of portraiture and incisive writing to make Turbulence worth the time of day, but the best way to regard this book is as a stepping stone, an exercise to maintain authorial fitness between one major work and-let us hope-the next. At its weakest-for example, when a pilot recalls his sister’s drowning in childhood-it comes across as melodrama, an appeal for unearned emotion. The problem is, a few such arresting moments aside, the sections are so brief that we don’t get time or space for the characters’ crises to wholly captivate our sympathy. ![]() ![]() Szalay works within the classical tradition of the short story, crafting epiphanies and heightened moments that throw light on a character’s past, present and future. Those who struggle to muster zeal for fiction set in drably familiar locales can rely on Szalay for the pleasures of armchair wanderlust. It shares with All That Man Is a fluent internationalism, and a structure that plants it in a fertile borderland between the novel and the collection of stories. ![]()
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