Travelling Companions

by Antoni Jach

Solitary travellers and a couple encounter Nina, an eloquent storyteller, on their travels through Spain, France and Italy. She entrances them all with her tales, which prompts her fellow travelling companions to share their own stories.

A handsome young man from Staten Island, who believes that life forms exist in other galaxies, vows to never work in an office again and travels by container ship to a commune in Italy. A lonely postal worker from Lodz takes home and reads the most interesting love letters, often becoming convinced a relationship needs his intervention, before delivering them the next day. A woman named Pauline calls herself Kim because her surname is Nowak. Depressed about turning forty, she mysteriously disappears from her own birthday party. Told by people on a journey, these are stories - rich with unexpected wisdoms - of lives in transit.

Travelling Companions is charming, amusing and philosophical - a wholly original exploration of what it means to honour our strangest dreams and disappointments. It is both a confrontation with, and a sweet diversion from, these, the darkest of times.

Genres: Novels, 21st Century

408 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2021

Reviews

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator of Travelling Companions, a nameless solitary traveller, knowledgeable in art, history, literature, encounters people wherever he goes and engages them in the telling of tales. He wants to listen and suggests they tell him a story. This way he collects a little group of solitary travellers that connects and disbands between Spain, France and Italy at the point where they have all reached their own limits of isolated travel. They suddenly crave companionship. A Canadian woman has temporarily left her relationship in Germany to think about her future, a Dutch spice trader recently retired who has lived his adult life in Indonesia is seeking a reckoning with his family’s 17thC origins troubled by the colonial history and the research he is doing that might unearth a slave trading past. Another woman travels around Europe as a mysterious courier, she tells long tales of her ex-lovers who she meets up with regularly during her various errands. An American couple live in different cities and get together for four weeks every year for their vacation together. They all have Eurail passes, its November 1999. They schedule things the old-fashioned way by writing who and when they will meet again in little pocket books noting the time of day, the location, the date and always seem to find each other as planned. Yes, there was life before digital aps and smart phones and people seemed to want to do the time-honed thing of talking to each other face to face, to feel human again they need to be among others.

The novel goes to the heart of our experience of being human through social contact, that we form connections through story-telling and that there may be something in the way we tell stories that interrupts a fixed notion of self. We travel and, in our travels, we are different to before, or project a self for a time, or reveal a self for a time among strangers. Strangers will often reveal the most intimate aspects of themselves to other strangers in this companionable state knowing they may never see them again. As though there is a safety in it, they cannot be hurt, and they perhaps might receive the sort of counsel they cannot get from those they already know. Travel releases possibilities of living and being. The self is transformed, or modified, or revealed.

The author, Antoni Jach, is a long-time Melbourne writing educator and author of several novels worth looking at. That he wrote them in Australia probably means he won’t be much read. Which falls nicely into one of my reviewing themes of kicking along Australian authors who need a wider audience and write well, and write good ideas. Full disclosure early, I have known Antoni for a long time and he happens to be my neighbour. Despite the limitation of knowing me, his work needs wider reading.

Jach reminds us constantly through connecting points of literature, art and film, that story-telling and questioning self is a historical constant and we are always devising forms to express these stories. From my limited understanding, I noted three deliberate literary precursors: Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. There may be others. The three classical references cover three reasons I can see that we tell stories. The Odyssey is the story of longing and return, the immigrant traveller always speak of home, tells who they encounter all about home, tell tales of how they got to be away from home and how to get back. Stories of home seem to be comforting when absent. The Canterbury Tales is the travelling story of pilgrimage and devotion. We all want to go see somewhere of value, tourists seek great cities as though performing a kind veneration ritual their travels. Those pilgrims tell tales to each other to pass the time of a long journey and amuse each other. In the Decameron, the tale tellers are in flight from the plague in Florence, seeking refuge in Fiesole (from recollection). Three types of stories: longing to return, amusement, flight.

And there are more variants on tale-telling. Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler makes an appearance, one of our travellers is reading it: with all those beginnings, the way encounters with solitary travellers are all beginnings that may not have the rest of the parts of their stories told.

The narrator is an Australian. Many people may or may not know this, but Australians are great travellers. We bridge the distance between our place of origin, seeking return, pilgrimage and amusement just like those story-tellers. We want to see great beauty in grand old European cities, where the architecture and galleries and lifestyle remind us of a home we never quite knew and seek it on long treks far from this new home. As a colonial nation, the English settlers had a concept of return written into their contracts. After ten years of colonial service, they could take three months off to return to old blighty. It still exists as a working condition in today’s contracts. One month to sail there, a month to see family, a month to return to work.

I read half of Travelling Companions at home, and the remainder on the plane flying to Greece. Which may be the best way to read it. And here’s a fun fact, the publisher, a small Melbourne press is called Transit Lounge.

As I read this, I realised our little band of readers here on GR who read similar books, and journey through them into the world of ideas and new places, are great listeners like our narrator. And great tellers of tales through their reviews about what they experienced. So, this is a book that should appeal to many among my GR fellow travelling companions through the world of books. Books connect to other books, like people connect to people. Each time we read a book, we change, we are not the same as we were before. If we are good readers, like our travelling companions here who are good listeners we may be changed by our interactions. So, the self keeps changing and adapting to ideas and stories – a theme well-developed in this book.

But is it available anywhere north of the equator? I hope you look for it.

This book review is made possible by jet lag and the adjustment to a different time zone. I wake at 2am, as though ready to start my day in another time and place. After reading this book and arriving, I have no choice but to keep reviewing, to fill the strange time of solitary thoughts at strange hours, and find my companions here on GR to tell this little tale.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

With millions of Australians in Lockdown due to the escape of the Delta variant of Covid-19, the release of a novel featuring European travel might not seem to be very good timing.  But that might depend on what kind of traveller you are or would like to be. I enjoyed Travelling Companions because it traverses destinations I've visited and features artworks and books that I love.

This month I was supposed to be taking one of the great train journeys of the world, the Ghan, from Adelaide to Darwin, but this week Lockdown was extended again.  So our trip was suspended, and now we're booked to go next year instead.  C'est la vie. Other people have had much greater disappointments and heartbreak.  And I don't mind too much because, truth be told, the Ghan is a poor substitute for the kind of travel I like to do in the UK and Europe.

Which is the kind of travel enjoyed by the narrator of Antoni Jach's new novel, Travelling Companions.  Just like me, he likes art galleries and museums, historic sites and remarkable buildings; and he likes to loiter in cafés and restaurants and soak up the ambience while enjoying the cuisines of Spain, France and Italy.  He doesn't get liverish if his travel plans go slightly awry; he just goes with the flow.  He also likes to make the acquaintance of other people with whom to share his experiences, and in all good faith he promises to stay in touch (but of course he never will.)

As a solo traveller, however, he seeks out company — especially in the evenings — and that's not something I do.  By dinner time, introverts like me are exhausted by human company, and besides, I've got a travel blog to write, books to read and — as readers of this blog know — the reviews don't stop when I'm travelling, not unless patchy internet lets me down.  But our narrator is delighted to strike up a friendship with an American couple called Gary and Nancy, and since they're doing the same kind of tourist trail he meets them again and again, mostly by prior arrangement.

Gary, alas, is a loquacious bore while Nancy is a sulky one.  In slabs of text representing his monologues, he explains the relationship difficulties they're having to the narrator:

I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this, seeing as you are pretty much a stranger, but then, on the other hand, I know why I'm telling you all this — it's because you are a stranger and you're a good listener and I trust you.  I can tell you don't feel the need to be the one who does all the talking.' (p.41)

Just as well!

To read the rest of my review, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/18/t...

[Nat White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting a tale of Eurail passes and youth hostel escapades in the beforetimes of the 90s. But this novel offered something far more interesting than reminiscing about backpacking laps. Instead, the unnamed narrator is a solo traveller who collects a ragged group of people pinioning through Spain, France and Italy in a similar direction. Some of their tales are more interesting than others, but when Nina starts spinning her eccentric fables, the group is drawn together and the novel really changes gear. A pleasurable read and the reminders of international travel aren’t too painful.

[Declan Fry]

Set in Europe in 1999, Antoni Jach’s fourth novel sees a group of travelling companions – thrown together by a train strike on the border between France and Spain – pass the time by regaling one another with stories as they trek across the continent. “[W]e are a group but not quite, there is a plausible deniability,” the unnamed narrator reflects.

The source of most of the tales in the novel is Nina. She alternates between sleeping and monologue, like some verbose variation of the protagonist in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. As she puts it in one of her stories: “It may indeed be healthier and less painful to live your life with a type of Prozac-medicated Don-Quixote-of-the-supermarkets style of delusion”.

Additionally, most of the male/female relationships in the book exhibit some variation of the “women as mysteries/men as boors” trope; when a character reflects that “my wife and I are unlikely bedfellows: she is sociable whereas I am saturnine; she is profligate whereas I am thrifty; she has never been employed in a workplace whereas all I do is work for my employer”, the most probable response of the reader will be that – in the context of this particular book – it is not unlikely at all.

Continue reading: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[Nalini Naidu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was exited about this book especially since I am about to take a solitary journey even though I am going to attend an event in 1 of my destinations. I found it easy to get into the book and keen to continue reading, I was a little bored with some of the tales the travellers told & a few of them were build up but did not deliver. I found pieces about solitary and couple travellers quite amusing and interesting and enjoyed Jach's writing. It would have been more interesting if the narrator had met other travellers in different locations