A book a day: Eva Piquer: Landing

I had little knowledge of Eva Piquer as a writer, although I did know her from her articles in journalistic and cultural media and from being someone with a very broad and rich background as a reader. So this recent publication, twenty years after her last novel, sparked my interest to see how she was doing as a narrative writer, and even more so after a twenty-year break. Unfortunately, the results are quite uneven.

The story begins with the first-person narrator telling us that she went to Iceland with three strangers, one of whom was a photographer who wanted to photograph the fuselage of a plane that had made an emergency landing on the island forty-six years ago and has remained in the same place ever since. That story encouraged her to travel to the island and learn the details of the accident, as well as to escape from her reality, a reality marked by the recent death of her husband and which she still has very present. In this way, the author places the story in 2020, three years after that tragic event in her life, which she describes by stating that “for three years the howls of horror had pierced my eardrums and I was silently invaded by an urgency to confess: the sooner you hit rock bottom, the sooner you will rise again.” But just when it seemed that she was beginning to recover, the pandemic appears, changing everything and locking her up, confining her to her solitude and her small home. For this reason, a few years later, she decides to undertake this journey and contacts the pilot who suffered the accident in order to see the remains of the plane, because the protagonist, intrigued by this story, wants to write about it, although the pilot refuses to alter the facts, to fictionalize them, so he sets a condition for her to want to write this story: “I don’t know what you want to write, but I refuse to be a character in a novel with an imagined personality. I could tell you what it all was like if you would write it as it was, without fictionalizing it.”

With this pretext, the author mixes fragments of the past in which the pilot recounts the journey and forced landing of the plane with his own experience and the grief (over)lived, establishing parallels that are not always achieved. In this way, his reflections and touches on life and death are simultaneous with the story of the aviator, as well as that of his own journey to meet the plane. Three intertwined stories that have their own separate story and that unfortunately can be read in isolation despite the author’s attempt to interweave the stories. This effort is evident and is excessively noticeable when the author uses expressions such as “putting the autopilot” (when referring to her day to day life), when she talks about how to manage to “stay on course” or even talking about vital “turbulences” which, although it does not cease to have an obvious parallelism, is perhaps somewhat forced.

The positive part of the novel is that the prose flows quickly and the book is read in one sitting even though the pilot’s story does not arouse interest, as one cannot empathise with a pilot about whom we are barely told anything on a personal level and who does not narrate anything different from other stories about air disasters that have happened (I think of Piers Paul Read’s “Alive!”) where there is a good portrait at the character level. A disaster story only holds up if the book focuses on it and especially on the impact on the lives of those who suffer it rather than on the journey itself; in this case it is not so, as it seems that the plane accident only serves as a channel to establish parallels that do not quite work because the reader quickly realises that it is merely a vehicle through which to explain a personal story (largely based on her own life) and that the author has wanted to capture in a fiction book in a kind of catharsis. Even the author herself seems to recognize the little impact of the pilot’s story by stating that “if I trusted him, I would tell him that I miss details of the human experience of the landing (…) as if he were not the pilot of the crashed plane,” thus confirming the sensations of emotional distance from the story told.

Another negative aspect that I find in the book is that the author frequently refers to and mentions authors and books that she highlights and paraphrases in a clear homage and demonstration of her literary background, but that appear in the text as brushstrokes. in media res. With the apparent purpose of giving some depth to the text, the author uses quotes from other authors and books she has read to launch some reflections from there (although in a fragmented way) and, despite the fact that they deal with life and death, there is no more continuity with the story than that of providing a series of aphorisms and reasonings around that same theme. This resource, which she uses more and more as the book progresses, does not contribute much to the story. In any case, it serves to understand the author’s state of mind and make us part of what she thinks, but it is a difficult resource to use successfully if you want to intertwine well with the story told and it is something only within the reach of a few (I would mention Gornick, Hardwick or Lispector). On the contrary, and fortunately, the story about the pilot does improve as the narrative progresses when it leaves aside the accident itself and we learn a little more about his personality and his life, although perhaps it is already a bit late for that since the disconnection with that part of the story has already occurred pages before.

For all these reasons, it is a book that is read in one sitting but, with the exception of some specific passages, does not really work and, following the same parallels used by the author, I could say that it ends up landing in the reader’s seat with some difficulties as well.