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Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single though gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs. I could use quotes and foot notes ��. I would be the mistress of my own text ��. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me �� insecure, indecisive, easily led astray

This book is published by one of the leading UK small presses, Fitzcarraldo Editions an independent publisher (their words) specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays ��.. it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language . Their novels are (my words) distinctively and beautifully styled, with plain, deep blue covers and a "French-flap" style. They are also (my experience) typically complex, lengthy and dense and as a result more admirable and worth than truly enjoyable.

This book �� a translation from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (and so smoothly translated that it reads like a book originally written in English) is the winner of the 2018 Man Booker International prize.

Overall this book is difficult to categorise �� its effectively a mediation on transitions �� particularly modern travel but also on fluidity and mobility, but with some lengthy historical diversions (typically relating to anatomical themes �� the human body and the historical parallels between mapping the complexities of the body and mapping the world is a key theme) and with some even more lengthy fictional tales. These include: a series of stories about a man Kunicki whose wife and children temporarily leave him on a small Croatian Island they are visiting on holiday; as well as the story which gives the book its English title about the Russian mother who on an impulse flees her disabled son and war veteran husband to live a life as a drifting vagrant on the Moscow metro inspired by a member of a movement-fetishing sect which gives the book its original, Polish title.

The book has interesting parallels with many other books, the number of parallels showing how wide ranging the author’s meditations travel from their centre (itself of course an embedded metaphor).

For example the narrator’s early experiences of the River Oder which seemingly plant in her the idea of travel versus stasis are very reminiscent of passages in Esther Kinsky’s River (by the same publisher). Also early on the narrator (whose voice largely disappears for much of the book) talks about her studies in a passage:

I studied psychology in a big gloomy communist city �� that part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look �� that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. Three feet of rubble.

Which reminded me of Han Kang’s The White Book (also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International), a book written in Warsaw and whose central conceit is that the narrator’s live is somehow built on the “broken pediment�� of the life her sister would have lived, had she not perished as a very young child, in the same ways Warsaw is built on the ruin of its former self.

The frequent visits to and obsession with anatomical museums (the back of the book includes a list of those visited) is very reminiscent of Jessie Greengrass’s Sight: A Novel (longlisted for the 20918 Women's Prize).

A very interesting angle I found was in a discussion on how the concept of linear time is associated with the move from a traditional agricultural to a mercantile economy:

Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal, a destination �� And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things

Interesting to me because my book of 2017, Jon McGregor’s 2018 Reservoir 13, explicitly looks to reinsert the concept of circular time into literature by examining how quotidian dramas play out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly.

Overall the parts of the book I most enjoyed were those relating to 21st Century travel �� partly I believe due to identification with its theme (given my frequent transatlantic flights on which much of my reading takes place) and partly due to the brevity and focus of those sections. I particularly enjoyed for example

Whenever I set off on a journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am …………�� [those like me] show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passpots, or where the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key��

She falls asleep too fast, exhausted from jetlag, like a lone card taken out of its deck and shuffled into another, strange one.

The other sections at times dragged �� summed up I think best by a section "A VERY LONG QUARTER OF AN HOUR" which in its entirety says

“On the plane between 8.45 and 9 a.m. To my mind, it took an hour, or even longer.��

Some of the pages and sections of the book felt very much the same to me �� too discursive and unfocused. In particular I would unfavourably contrast the book with Charco Press’s Fireflies by Luis Sagasti which manages to roam across 20th Century history (particularly the history of flight) and 20th Century art in only 85 pages.

Overall though as the quote at the start of this review makes clear �� the discursive, flowing style is very deliberate here and associated precisely with the state of fluidity and transition that the book is exploring, or to give another quote.

There are different kinds of looking. One kind of looking allows you to simply see objects, useful human things, honest and concrete, which you know right away how to use and what for. And then there’s panoramic viewing, a more general view, thanks to which you notice links between objects, their network of reflections. Things cease to be things, the fact that they serve a purpose is insignificant, just a surface. Now they’re signs, indicating something that isn’t in the photographs, referring beyond the frames of the pictures. You have to really concentrate to be able to maintain that gaze, as its essence it’s a gift, grace.