Matter over mind

David Szalay’s characters drift, indifferent and alone, caught in currents of seemingly trivial events that carry them further from comfortable shores. Encounters begin and end without resolution, connections form and dissolve in passing, and only in retrospect, if ever, do scars appear. ‘Are you happy that you’re alive?’ one character asks another in Turbulence (2018), Szalay’s short story collection that circumnavigates the globe via consecutive aviation encounters. The protagonist of each story meets their successor, with ubiquitous woe making Senegalese businessman indistinguishable from Canadian novelist. The twelve travellers crammed into roughly one hundred pages suffer the consequences of globalised relationships, of a single human network in which personal connections are stretched thin and tension ripples far, as their lives are thrown off-kilter by cold gusts of fate. Characters’ sense of their own existence and surroundings is tenuous. One character reflects: ‘It was strange to think that the same people would walk around the same paths tomorrow, without him being there to see them.’