Hello Gentle Reader,
Traveling
by train occupies a visage of the old-world travel, one of privilege and
genteel inclination. Conjuring images of first-class cars and dining cars,
full-service amenities, providing the transitory composition of the comforts of
home in the compact, perfect for the individual whose life can be encapsulated
in carry on, a requirement for the lifestyle of transit, continually in motion
propelling ever further into the distance. Before the expansion and
commercialization of air travel, trains were the only way to efficiently and
effectively mauver through landscapes. They were the logistic marvels, carrying
cargo and passenger alike, on predestined serpentine tracks, they zipped and
zagged along, whizzing by onto new horizons. Passenger car rail travel still
operates and exists, but remains a European reality, an otherwise densely
populated and developed luxury, benefiting a smaller surface area with a denser
population. In the case of Canada, commuter rail and passenger rail have all
but fallen out of fashion. A few still exist, but are exuberant and luxuriously
priced journeys for the locomotive aficionado; while daily commuter trains have
come under considerable criticism and scrutiny as passengers of the service
have criticized the services habitual tardiness and consistent deliverance of
inconveniences, further compounded by a lack of infrastructure investment and
upkeep, in addition to preventive maintenance, which only exasperates delays
and cancellations. The national railways of Canada, long since privatized, hold
only profit in their eyes with shareholders in their ears, exist only to ship
freight from one end to the other; moving people is no longer in their
portfolio. No, the Canadian mode of cross-country travel is one of
independence, the demand for control of one’s asphalt destiny, the long-haul
road trip, the dreaded endless car ride. Piled into the backseat with siblings
or the overflow of luggage, most Canadian children would be familiar to the
term ‘close quarters,’ as they endured and rode onto the expanse of the
frontier, passing through villages, cities, and the sense of endless driving
into a yawning landscape of boundless space, punctuated with pits stops where
one relieves themselves and stretches their legs, before resuming their
motorized voyage once more, where bon voyage is aptly replaced with: on the
road again. Of course, road trips became a symbol of freedom and wanderlust,
popularized by the Beatniks and Jack Kerouac’s celebratory novel of the open
road, “On the Road,” which traced the cartography of youthful hedonism as it
embraced the discombobulation and disorientation of perpetual transience and
movement as a state of being in the pursuit of adventure and meaning in a
postwar world. The indefinite sense of dislocation of space in motion, and the
claustrophobia of shared travel within the liminal space between departure and
destination, are beautifully captured by Maylis de Kerangal’s novel
“Eastbound,” which recounts the happenstance chance encounter between two
individuals, who in sharing a train ride, find their journeys intertwined
within one another, and become comrades and accomplices in a shared escape; at
first by a sense of intrigue and interest, fueled by sympathy, later soured
into disgruntled entanglement, fortified by the aggressive desperation and plea,
until finally resolved with an understanding
that the moment turn off and turn back had long since past.
Maylis de Kerangal is a French writer whose novels trace and recount with intensity the proclivities of the human condition, ordained towards ingenuity, innovation, and creativity, which inevitably entangles itself within the catchall term of occupation. Through topics which range from cooking, to painting, to engineering, to surgery and organ transplants, de Kerangal places each subject beneath the microscope and drills into the essence of each preoccupation, revealing and unfurling the subjects beyond their immediate and palpable realities, whereby Maylis de Kerangal traces their incognito and ethereal connections to the human condition and the indominable spirit of human achievement and the capacity for creation. Through a literary style that maneuvers effortlessly between breathless breakneck sentences, which skip like stones across the surface, never sinking into the mire of superfluous detail, while sketching and describing the facts and figures of the matter with cinematic grace. Inevitably this means de Kerangal is compared to a documentary filmmaker in a literary sense, whose voluptuous literary language encapsulates and celebrates the achievement of craftsmanship, while exploring through broad brushstrokes the interior of the characters. The exploration of the private interior is the hallmark of “Eastbound,” as it traces the mismatched duet of two unlikely travelers who find themselves aligned and then bound together on the Trans-Siberian Railway, cutting through almost a quarter of the Earth’s circumference.
Aliocha is the first. A conscripted solider who is described as but a boy who has still to fill out the uncertain adult man’s body that he has developed into. Aliocha finds himself amongst the other conscripts, crowded and cramped together, their rowdiness disguising their own anxiety of their impending service as they zip along the far eastern reaches of Russia into the unknown. None of them know where their end destination is, while each of them plots and discusses the way they escape, when they unload at stations they crowd and herd together smoking in close knit groups, never straying far from the shadow of the train and their nearing, albeit unknown, destination, before returning to their compartment:
“He’s posted at the far end of the train, at the back of the last wagon in a compartment slathered in thick paint, a cell, pierced by three openings, that the smokers have seized immediately. This is where he’s found himself a spot, a volume of space still unoccupied, notched between other bodies. He has pressed his forehead to the back window of the train, the one that looks out over the tracks, and stays there watching the land speed by at 60km/h—in this moment it’s a wooly mauve wilderness, his shitty country.”
Then of course amidst the crowded chaos, Aliocha is casually assaulted, a premotion of what brutalisation awaits of wherever he is going, as the train maneuvers through the endlessness of the Russian far east, described as a “enclave bordered by the immensity,”:
“at the end of the rails, there will be the barracks and the diedovchina, the hazing, and once he’s there, if the second-year conscripts burn his dick with cigarettes, if they make him lick the toilets, deprive him of sleep or fuck him up the ass, no one will be able to do anything to help [. . .],”
Enter Hélène the French expat who finds herself on the same train as Aliocha. Rather than feeling conscription, however, Hélène is abandoning her Russian boyfriend, Anton, who in turn has returned to Russia to accept a position at a hydroelectric dam. For Anton this is a homecoming, but for Hélène, who is alluded to being more oriented to the metropolitan, finds herself alienated and isolated within the aforementioned immensity of Siberia, its rugged rustic terrain and provincial qualities, which inevitably have her pinned as a foreigner, which forces her to board the first train out, which happens to be train barreling eastbound to Vladivostok, a roundabout return to France. The encounter between Aliocha and Hélène is a chance once, shared by observing the emptiness of Siberia as it statically flies by the moving train:
“But they don’t move, standing before the pane of glass which is like a movie screen for them, where everything stirs gently, molecular as terror and desire, and then suddenly the night tears open and the landscape hardens outside, clean, geometrical, pure lines and new perspectives, the end of the organic night, the forest rises up in the razing light of dawn, and it’s still the same forest, the same slender trees, the same orangey trunks, a forest identical to itself to this extent is insane [. . .],”
Aliocha’s desperation for desertion, to be spared his conscripted fate, is what compels him to reach out to Hélène, who doesn’t see a beggar or victim of circumstance, but merely an individual in transit, a fellow runaway. Be it pity or sympathy, Hélène is complicit and extends a generous hand to the young conscript. What follows is a brisk and tense narrative. Neither Aliocha or Hélène can communicate wholeheartedly with either one and bumble enough understanding through a smatter of Russian and pantomime. Maylis de Kerangal doesn’t bother detailing the breakdown in language or failure of communication, instead de Kerangal captures their understanding through furtive effervescence and the context of experience. Via narrative, de Kerangal moves between intimate fixation on both Aliocha and Hélène, engaging in detours into their past and psychology, providing enough insight to understand their motivations and their present predicaments, to broad brushstrokes of cinematic detail describing the landscape in transit, or a roiling boil of images capturing the essence of the situation. One beautiful cascading passage, reveals all the Russian images and stock characteristics Hélène had collected and collated when she had envisioned Russia; while the imagined planetary woman of Aliocha, showcases just how out of place the conscript is within the grit reality of military service. Maylis de Kerangal prose is the true gem of the novel, however, which is pitch perfectly translated by Jessica Moore. The sentences skip with breathtaking speed, a parade of images which remain airy and ethereal, never becoming excessive or voluble, teetering on the void of superfluous loquacious meaninglessness, and are stitched together with seamless perfection. “Eastbound,” is a gem of human drama. A mastery of narrative which strikes a balance of beautiful prose with compelling narrative, an absolute pleasure to read.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read