Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. It’s impossible not to laugh at the opening line, “I’m reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of….” Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.Ī welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into “exotic” practices and cabinets of curiosity. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation-and suddenly reappear. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel-through space and also through time-and a thoughtful, ironic voice. It’s not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known-and sometimes reviled-for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland’s most lauded and popular authors.Īlready a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk ( House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

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