Books: Antoni Jach’s Travelling Companions.
“How to be alone yet to be in company?
That,” the unnamed narrator of Travelling Companions tells us, “is the conundrum.” As a train strike throws him into travel limbo with other tourists on the Spanish–french border, he observes: “We are a group but not quite, there is a plausible deniability.” Banding together helps, he notes elsewhere, to “beat down the ontological insecurity”.
Antoni Jach’s fourth novel is set in Europe on the eve of the 21st century. Venice is sinking, and it’s raining where guidebooks promised sunshine, but with Facebook and smartphones still years in the future, connection happens IRL. Although it is November 1999, no one is reading Harry Potter: the tastes of the narrator and his “notquite” group run more to The Decameron, Chekhov, Plato and Calvino. This is a selfconsciously cultured, middle-class, Modernist novel of ideas, and the characters’ reading list is an effective Lonely Planet guide to the beaten tracks from whence the ideas come. Music and art play a role too: surreal attempts to get across the border, over the course of an elastic day, take the narrator three times to Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dalí.
The novel’s present-tense narration and yearly holiday structure reinforce the sense of itinérance. There’s no backwards-looking view to organise or ascribe shape or meaning to the “aimless wandering”. The characters, solipsistic and prone to monologuing on their obsessions, listen and talk but rarely converse. Interruptions are expressly forbidden by Nina,
Transit Lounge, 408pp, $32.99
the sylphic master storyteller whose tales entrance the others while obviating the need for conversation.
For all their imaginative plotting and existential questioning, Nina’s stories tend to centre on male protagonists and sexually available, beautiful women. The women in her stories, as in the novel itself, divide broadly into beautiful libertines and neurotic, bitter and/or shallow materialists, a certain kind of male fantasy and counter-fantasy. A young Swede (attractive libertine), for example, tells the group that when she was in high school, two years earlier, boys pulled off her clothes in public, leaving her standing in her cheap white underwear and laughing at her: “It wouldn’t have been so humiliating if I was standing in expensive French lingerie.” (Said no sexual harassment survivor ever.)
Nina, incurious about her companions, naps when others speak; it’s hard to imagine how she collected all those stories in the first place. The narrator, an unjudgemental collector of narrative bricolage, finds •Linda her fascinating. They can have each other. Jaivin
What kind of fruit would you be, and why?
The unnamed narrator of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life struggles to answer this question at a group job interview as she stands in a circle with other interviewees. It’s one of many moments that highlight the ways the surreal and absurd stitch life’s fabric.
The second book by Aucklandborn Zarah Butcher-mcgunnigle, it follows Autobiography of a Marguerite, an experimental and autobiographical woven prose poem exploring autoimmune disease and familial dysfunction.
Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life also bridges poetry and prose, or more accurately, boxes them – its neat slabs of text are laid out in blocky stanzaic paragraphs. Aphoristic and epigrammatic, they collect the thoughts of a woman in her late 20s with depression and chronic illness who has graduated from a creative writing degree and now shuffles between job interviews and online dating.
She’s becalmed and isolated except for an anodyne parade of featureless – except for the occasional “big dick” – Tinder dates. These include a married couple who offer her a very small bowl of muesli, someone who says he’s “not interested in what you’re saying” (he’s “just being honest”) and men gazing backwards at their exes, including the ex with psoriasis like the narrator (“maybe that was his type”).
New things come into her life. An administrative job at a bakery, dealing with the rage of people who receive plain croissants