They meet at the same time at the same airport transit. Four life stories are told in Bianca Bell’s new book called Transfer. A separate story is dedicated to each protagonist, but only from the whole does an overarching theme flow: the values that make us able to let our lives go on by themselves or stop the cycle and start again, differently.
A Czech writer and also an interpreter with Bulgarian roots, Bellová broke into the ranks of the big names of contemporary domestic prose with her fourth novel Jezero from 2016. It was translated into many languages and won several awards, including the Magnesia Litera for the book of the year.
The author followed up the success with the novella Mona. But then it was as if she realized that it made no sense to repeatedly pour new material into an unchanging narrative shell, and continued to explore different territories: These fragments were a collection of chiseled short stories about the values we now worship, whereas the novel The Island from the year before last took place outside of modern time and space and he paid tribute to the art of storytelling, even if his protagonists did not live very well.
The new short story collection Transfer confirms that Bell is somewhat consciously outside the mainstream of commercially successful literature. Its readership demands that the authors do not experiment a bit, to offer in a new package the same thing that was liked before. That is why, in such books, everything usually revolves around love or family relationships, to which social and historical contexts create only a neat, clear background. Therefore, they tend to be told in a sleepy style, which is not characterized by originality and does not hinder quick reading. A person understands everything the first time and can rush to the next novelty from the bookstore.
Bellová, on the other hand, plays with writing. He tries unusual paths and thinks about how to put everything together so that the reader absorbs even the nuances, so that he returns and thinks about what he has read.
Transfer focuses on life stories in which love, relationships with others and complications brought by fate or chance play a role. All the protagonists are already past their zenith, they cannot expect that the most beautiful moments are yet to come. Linda finds herself in transit on her way back from her mother’s funeral. Her flight is canceled in the post-pandemic era, when airlines are struggling with staff shortages, and she and other passengers end up in an airport hotel. There, she experiences a relationship semi-romance, from which it follows that no one will care for her anymore and that compassion cannot be demanded.
Last year in London, Bianca Bell received the literary prize announced by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. | Photo: Marta Režová
In the transfer, the intellectual Michael exaltedly observes the phenomenal surface of the current world, which appears to him to be artificial, machine-made, and so he clings to dreaming of the good times, when people worked with hands or feet instead of brains and everyone lived authentically.
Another hero, David, is a hopeless loser in terms of orderly lives, but he has the quality of loving Jack Kerouac books. He finds himself in the transfer after returning from Greece, where he went to visit a person who spoke with the American novelist. Finally, the last protagonist, Silva, has three children with a celebrity painter, of whom he is now just a helpless old man.
Nothing major will happen to anyone. Characters don’t experience an awakening where they suddenly see what they did wrong and why. The author does not place them at the poles of positive or unequivocally repulsive. And that’s the point: great literature is not created by taking great events such as murder, rape or terrorizing family members. The old masters could write a nice piece just for the fact that someone would somehow look or answer a question.
With Bell, this feeling of being able to work with detail, with nuance, with a feeling in which the small and drab suddenly appears fatal, comes to life. In the small space of the less than fifty-page book, he makes sure that the descriptions, speeches and thought processes of the actors are functional and allow the reader to reflect that what one believes in is refuted by the experience of another. That there are no simple solutions or values that can be shouted as slogans. That we don’t talk just to tell each other as accurately as possible how things are, but on the contrary to maintain the illusion that the blame is always on someone else.
The short story collection Transfer is not Bell’s most fundamental book. However, it is good proof that even in today’s times, literature does not have to be in the first place and it is not necessary to drag into it the motives that are currently moving the world. That it is also possible to write about eternal topics in a new way: about the fact that we do not know how to manage our lives well, that we do not always manage to steer in the direction that seems to be the only meaningful one to a distant observer.
Bell made four castaways clinging to the fact that their plane wasn’t flying. And it offers a chance to think about what’s going on in their lives more than the flight schedule.
Bianca Bellová: Transfer
Host Publishing House 2023, 136 pages, 349 crowns.
