David Szalay's Turbulence looks at how we're disconnected in a connected world
Ryan B. Patrick | | Posted: November 13, 2019 4:40 PM | Last Updated: November 13, 2019
David Szalay's novel Turbulence links the stories of 12 passengers on a series of flights around the world. The multicultural narrative passes from one character to the next, spanning places such as London, Madrid, Dakar, Sao Paulo, Toronto and more.
Each chapter explores a new personal crisis — whether it's a mother worrying about her son's cancer treatment or a journalist heading out on a delicate assignment.
Szalay was born in Montreal, but grew up in London and now lives in Budapest. His previous novel, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
Szalay talked to CBC Books about how he wrote Turbulence.
Started as radio stories
"Writing this book was a very different experience to my previous work, including All That Man Is. Turbulence was originally commissioned as a series of 12- to 15-minute radio stories for the BBC. That meant the stories were going to be very short, far shorter than I would otherwise consider writing.
"I had the idea of the flights and the characters connecting to each other via these flights in a variety of ways. That idea was fixed from the beginning and couldn't be changed."
Mapping out the narrative
"Early in the planning stages, I was getting the stories clear in my mind. I knew that I had to map the whole thing out before I began writing. I knew the narrative would be cyclical in nature. If you're only writing a couple of thousand words about a character, you need to know less about them than if you're writing 200 pages about them.
In these very short stories, the whole world is something which you are suggesting in very few words. You give the impression that there's whole world lying behind it.
"It's a different writing process in that respect. You don't need to inhabit the character's whole world; you simply need to produce the illusion of that whole world. In these very short stories, the whole world is something which you are suggesting in very few words. You give the impression that there's a whole world lying behind it. It was a challenge to make the characters come alive in that short space of each story. I hope I've managed to do that."
The connections between us
"The book is about the way in which we're all connected, almost unprecedentedly, on a global level. It's the idea of degrees of separation, this web of connections. At the same time, the personal connections that we have with the people we live with is becoming more frayed through the ease of communication that we have. We're less present at any given moment.
The book is about the way in which we're all connected, almost unprecedentedly, on a global level. It's the idea of degrees of separation, this web of connections.
"We can't sit down without getting our phone out and plugging ourselves into the abstract world in our devices. We've stopped noticing that people are around us. Many of the situations in the book are about people who are having difficulties communicating with the people they're actually with."
World traveller
"The book is undoubtedly informed by my own experiences. I was born in Canada but I grew up in England. I was someone who was half-Canadian and half-Hungarian but also British. As a child, my family moved around a lot and I've travelled a lot of throughout my life.
"More recently, I've lived in a number of European countries. My own lack of rootedness undoubtedly has contributed to the kind of things that interest me as a writer."
David Szalay's comments have been edited for length and clarity. You can see more interviews from the How I Wrote It series here.