After all those long reads, it was time to plump up my list of books with some good novellas. I waited a long time for Claire Keegan’s Foster to come in at the library, but it was well worth it. A young Irish girl is sent to live with a childless couple for the summer, only to learn from a gossipy neighbor that their only child had been drowned in a slag pile. How can the girl absorb this terrible knowledge after they’ve both been so good to her? The father gives her an all-time great piece of advice: “‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’” This is a sweet, spare jewel of a book about the families we are given and the families we find.
In Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, a French woman, Helene, takes it into her head to run away from her Russian boyfriend Anton by boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway toward China and the Pacific. On the train, she means Aliocha, a young conscript who is desperate to escape from the army. Though they have no common language, Helene agrees to hide Aliocha in her first-class carriage on the condition that he will slip away when the train stops at Irkutsk.
Helene had been swept off her feet when she first met her boyfriend Anton in France: “the sounds of Russian boil inside his French,” and her “tragic and patchy image of Russia” is epitomized by an old song, Oi, to ne vecher, about “the plains, horses, violence: a typical Russian story.” But something impels her to leave, and soon the train, “this engine of iron that materializes time,” places her under a kind of spell. It “compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with earth’s clocks: the train like a spaceship.” The provodnitsa, or cross-border agents, “split the whole of Russia across the width, from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Vladivostok to Moscow—nearly a quarter of the circumference of the earth with each trip, did you know; …their eyes have seen wild irises and forbidden villages—clouded in coal with names that don’t even appear on maps….”
Aliocha fails to escape as planned, and when he is discovered missing, a manhunt begins. The tension is fierce, the moral implications profound. Eastbound is the story of a remarkable and highly conditional friendship set against the backdrop of a beautiful country perhaps best visited in one’s imagination.
This brings me to what Lauren Zima used to call a “shameless plug:” My novelette, “Consignment,” will be published in August by ELJ Editions as part of a series called “Afternoon Shorts.” One title will be released every month. The first two stories in the series are already available on Amazon: “Winners and Losers” by Travis Grant and “Like A Compass In Her Bones” by Kristin Kozlowski. You can preview the series here: https://twitter.com/EmergeJournal/status/1622945192360701952?s=20. One of my favorite things about this project is that I now feel connected to eleven other writers I’d never heard of before. Please give them a read.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 