Eastbound by Maylis De Keranngal

French fiction

Orignal title – Tangente ver L’est

Translator Jessica Moore

Source – Personal copy

This was a buy from Alnwick when I went to Barter Books. It had been on my radar since coming out. It is published in the UK by Les Fugitives, but in the US, one of my all-time favourite publishers brought it out, Archipelago Books. But her other books in the UK have been published by Maclehose Press, and I have reviewed two of them and read her short story collection. Maylis De Keranagal is a writer who is great at moments, people and how they interact. What drew me to this it was around a Russian soldier defecting and a French woman with her own story.

Aliocha locks himself in the first toilet cubicle that’s free, washes the blood from his face with plenty of water, examines the marks, makes himself a compress by tearing a length of toilet paper from the huge roll attached to the wall and soaks it in ice-cold water before pressing it to his red profile, his swollen nose. And then, ignoring the insults shouted by people waiting outside, their kicks against the door, he takes his time checking the mirror to make sure his face is slowly regaining its colour and volume.

But his bruises mark him out now as a victim, he knows it, and once he’s out of the toilet he seeks out the shadows, the darkness, and reaches his train carriage by slinking along the walls.

As he tries to find a way out of his military service in the train.

The story follows the Trans Siberian Express as it heads across Russia. On board is a young man, Aliocha, barely out of his teens, who is a conscript with his fellow conscripts on this train to spend time in the military in some far-flung hinterland in Siberia. He has tried to get out of it every way he can.So he is trying to find a way to escape of the train and hopefully find freedom. AS he initially hides in a toilet, he sees a woman unlike any he has seen before. This French woman has an air different to anyone else that he has seen. So he follows her and as he feels the fact he could be found he goes in her compartment and gets her to change her clothes so he can seem different she initially is hesitant but lets this young man and as the train g=cross the land we see Helene’s tale and that like Aliocha is on the run from her own problems a love affair with a man called Anton, the passionate affair started in Paris but as time goes on it has gone wrong hence she is escaping on the train as well. This is a tale of two lost souls, each with a reason to want to be as far away from their own lives as possible, colliding on this train.

THE DOORS slide open behind him. Someone has come into the compartment.

Aliocha turns: the woman who got on in Krasnoyarsk, the foreigner, it’s her. In one hand she holds a glass encased in silver mesh, and in the other, a lit cigarette. She stands in profile at a side window; she, too, is rummaging around in the night, the night that never closes completely here, but stays ambiguous, charged with an electric luminosity that always makes you think day is about to break. Aliocha observes her surrepti-tiously, swivelling his eyes in their sockets without moving his body: she’s smoking, very calm, her face faintly shining. He’s never seen women like her, awake at this time of night and alone on trains transporting troops, women in men’s shirts and big boots, not in Moscow;

Helene catches his eye she is so different than other on the Train

I had heard Mookse’s podcast about Hotel novels. I think this is maybe the next subject they may do about books set in a place as a train journey is such a great setting for a novel as it is always a cross-section of people, and this is so much the case here. How else would a young 20-year Russian conscript want to run away ever meet an attractive middle-aged French woman herself also wanting to escape an event in her life? The parallel in the stories is something she has touched on in other books,. The moment is a turning point in the book Mend the Living and the tale of two people connected by a single heart. This has a turning point of a disaster, whether it is death or her trying to escape her world. Then there is the pace of the book. It has that feeling of the train, and when you are on a long trip on a train, but the near you get to the end, the faster the world seems to go, and this is the case here. We find out the two of them stories and when they meet and he hides the book moves on from that point like an intercity 125 on course as the two of them are  Eastbound on the Trans Siberian Express, but maybe both wanting to be Westbound will the find Aliocha and will Helene escape the boredom of her life with Anton back to the city she loves Paris. Have you read any of her books?

Winstons score – +A a great novella from one of the leading French writers