L'avventura

“If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind… but if I lost myself, where could I go?” pg 61

At the part of Sputnik Sweetheart when Miu told K that Sumire had vanished off of a greek island, I immediately thought of the film L’avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The similarities of the situation are striking.  A woman takes a boat ride with her friends off the coast of Italy.  They stop at an island, nap, and when they awake, the woman has disappeared.  Like smoke.  Her best friend and her boyfriend (similar to Miu and K, with gender reversals) set off to find her, but the island is hardly more than a large rock, and she’s clearly not there.  They head to the mainland and go through all the motions: talking to the police and filing reports.  But soon they forget about her.

The Adventure.  It’s a strange title for a story about a missing woman.  But at the same time I feel like Sputnik Sweetheart could have also been called The Adventure.  There is a lightness that the title suggests, as if the story will be simply about an adventure.  This fits though, because each story takes the fact of a missing woman rather lightly.  K and Miu are never very worried, in my opinion.  They surely don’t act the way I would in the situation, and in L’avventura, the friends seem to only pretend to worry.

I can’t begin to guess what happened to either woman, and in both L’avventura and Sputnik Sweetheart there aren’t many hints.  Where does one go when they are lost?  Speculations are commonplace, but nothing is revealed with certainty.  Sputnik Sweetheart dissolves into a mix of magic and surrealism, whereas L’avventura evolves to a realist romance as we forget about the character who was introduced to us as the lead.

I find this book to me very far away from a travel novel.  I find it to be much less about the experience of changing through travel by learning about a new culture than about traveling to a parallel universe (if only one inside your mind) and finding yourself, or perhaps losing yourself.  I think losing yourself is key.  I think that in both L’avventura and Sputnik Sweetheart there are important relationships between losing and finding, although articulating them would be difficult.

I remember at the end of L’avventura I was far more confused than at the beginning, and I feel the same way now that I’ve finished Sputnik Sweetheart.  There is no closure.