Book review | There is a “blood-stopping incident” around the globe

Novel

Maggie Shipstead: Around the Earth (Great Circle). Finnish Kaisa Sivenius. Big Dipper. 709 pp.

International ones the papers overflowed with ecstatically laudatory adjectives. Living in Los Angeles, traveling the world diligently by Maggie Shipstead (b. 1983) plush novel Around the globe seems to have created a craze that united readers and critics in a rare way right after it was published last year.

Among other things, it was nominated for the prestigious Booker and Womes's Prize for Fiction. Although the highest crown was not obtained in both, the breakthrough can be characterized as dazzling.

It's precisely such blood-curdling cases that even the somewhat ambitious publishing market needs in order to succeed in the competition for the spending habits of groups in their free time.

The 700 pages of a different hour is of course full of fun, which probably appeals to many: a story that takes you high and deep to the ends of the world, which you can empathize with almost endlessly.

Ocean steam sinking at the beginning of World War II offers, literally, an explosive start to a family story that, in its intermediate episodes, extends all the way to our own time.

There are several narrative, skilfully multidimensionally drawn main characters in Shipstead's work, but one still stands out clearly above the others: a girl from a remote village in Montana who knows early on that she wants to fly.

He simply just knows!

Maggie Shipstead Picture: Maggie Shipstead

The reader can think for himself, whether the burning need is based on the desire to escape oppressive conditions, both symbolically and concretely, or on disappearing one's self and one's limitations to heights where there is nothing.

Or does the girl grow up to become a woman driven to the heroism that practically belongs only to men? He wants to go around the globe, crossing both the North and South poles.

A novel Orphaned Marian Graves quits school at the age of 14 and succeeds as she takes her first step towards her dream.

We're living in the time of Prohibition, and a powerful trocar elsewhere needs a brawler to fly loads of booze from the Canadian side to the United States. In other words, something completely different from Charles Lindbergh With his Spirit of St. Louis plane that crossed the Atlantic.

Obsessively in love, the employer arranges flight training for the young man. At the same time, passion and disgust wrap around them for years. With an extraordinarily delicate pen, Shipstead creates this magic circle of disproportionate forces.

In addition to realizing human tendencies Around the globe has required a huge amount of background work on the history of aviation in general and the female pioneers of the field in particular. There were others as well Amelia Earhartand no one's sky is flat in the world of men.

For example, Maggie Shipstead could be characterized in the shredding of the traditional image of Americanness by Joyce Carol Oates to continue the tradition.

If the globe is unpredictable in its poles and oceans, unpredictable and even unknown are of course the central characters of the novel even to themselves – no matter how they explore in their ego as well. Thus, the “Great circle” mentioned in the title of the initial work will inevitably remain empty.

A pilot sister and her twin brother, a visual artist, in different worlds make the same journey to extremes, as it were.

Actually, a pioneer pilot named Marian Graves has not existed, although the almost documentary background of the circumstances leads one to think otherwise.

To some extent, Shipstead is also captured by its huge background material, especially the activities of female pilots in England during the war. There are enough details that don't lead anywhere, let alone the character of the characters.

For my taste, after the initial enthusiasm, he still rants too much.

Worst interludes in contemporary Hollywood that sap the power of the narrative. A film is being prepared about Marian Graves and her last flight, whose main character, scandal star Hadley Baxter, herself lost her parents as a child: they disappeared with their small plane, just like Marian did decades earlier.

Through various twists and turns, Hadley ends up solving the mystery of Marian's disappearance – and apparently a thematic connection should also be built between them by breaking gender-based role expectations.

But today's woman remains a very thin figure compared to her predecessor. Hadley has almost no problem other than the fact that she can't always marry a guy exactly when she wants.

The hypocritical morality of the publicity industry and the paparazzi bully.

Thus the right to a large extent, the opus of fascinating materials remains unclaimed to the very last.

For me, the main glue that holds Shipstead's novel together is this idea of ​​a still very immature Marian, which transcends, bypasses and evaporates gender assumptions:

“He couldn't understand why other people couldn't see his future self, or that his guaranteed future wasn't visible like some eye-catching piece of clothing. The belief that he would become a pilot filled his whole world, and its truth appeared to be absolute.”

More than a blood tie, kinship is built on the foundation of this kind of fervent belief in the spirit tribe, across decades and both latitudes and longitudes.

The message is beautiful and Around the globe -the novel's proof of that is strong.