The book is called Eastbound and the author a French novelist, Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore). From the opening page we are on a train about to travel through seven time zones, finally, into a zone seemingly beyond time, a train to elsewhere.
The novella carries us into an elongation across the length
of Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. Two lives will be transformed. The
journey is a taut and exuberant passage to love and freedom. It is a flight
from military conscription, from regimentation, brutality and a violence
against the soul.
Her writing is both grounded in detail yet transcendent at
the same time. I was transfixed in her rich language but also moved to turn the
page by the propulsive sentences. At times it feels powered as if by an engine and
other times it slows for contemplation.
I must confess at age ninety I find fiction to be an
exertion. Perhaps it is the weight on my lids from a suspension of disbelief.
Yet here was a work of fiction which I took on with gratitude for the
transport.
We are on the Trans-Siberian railroad crossing the wasteland
of Russia where men are sent for daring to dissent; a one-way ticket of no
return. The forests are fertilized by dead bodies. It could be our own
landscape of genocide and human bondage, our so-called heartland of misplaced
vehemence, our congregation of the lost.
Our two protagonists speeding eastbound toward the light of
a new day are desperate to be reborn into a simple declaration of free will and
an unspoken spiritual awakening.
The achievement of this gem is how de Kerangal artfully
writes on two tracks; the highly charged detailed rendering of each fraught
moment along with the lift of her language which deposits us in another realm.
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