Canoes

Starred review from September 15, 2024
The opening story in this exquisite collection by French writer de Kerangal (Eastbound, 2023) portrays a woman who writes TV subtitles as she shifts through memories during a dentist appointment. The dentist, who's wearing a "pendant, a small gold metal canoe," shows her a photograph of a "human jawbone from the Mesolithic." This intricately surprising tale introduces a motif and a theme. Readers will watch for the subtle appearance of a canoe in each story, while becoming entranced by each sensitive, witty, and imaginative drama propelled by speech and silence, self and voice. The eccentric, legendary Klang sisters invite a singer to record a poem by Edgar Allan Poe to add to their audio collection. A woman begs her father to erase her late mother's voice from his answering machine. The longest, most complexly involving tale is narrated by a Frenchwoman who, with her young son, joins her husband in Colorado, and suffers profound culture shock, beginning with his changed voice. De Kerangal pairs gloriously sensuous and caustically incisive visual descriptions of interiors, cities, highways, sprawling suburbs, land, and sky with uncanny and revealing soundscapes that capture the layered timbres of nature, humans, and machines. These unusual and vibrant stories are poetically recalibrating, droll, and intriguing.

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September 15, 2024
A searching story collection considers the meaning, textures, and echoes of language. French author de Kerangal's eight stories--seven very brief tales and one novella--constitute a sensitive group marked by vocal suggestions, impressions, and reverberations. Several listen closely to the timbre of a voice, as in "Stream and Iron Filings," where a woman lowers her tone to sound less fragile, more trustworthy, for her new radio job. In "Nevermore," the narrator is reading the titular Edgar Allan Poe poem in a sound studio, part of a recording project combining many voices, hers described as "light canoe on dark ocean." In the touching "A Light Bird," a father and daughter argue over the deletion of the answering-machine message spoken by their wife and mother, now dead for more than five years. For the father, the voice exists in an "infinite present" while he and his child resemble "two blind people in a canoe, paddling countercurrent." Teasing canoe references crop up widely, from the nucleus of Halley's comet in "Arianespace" to an actual craft, hovering, wedged between walls, in "Ontario." While several stories have a French setting, the novella, Mustang, describes the strain of a French woman's temporary relocation to Golden, Colorado, tolerating her partner Sam's wish for a change of course after a tragic event. Sam's voice becomes louder and slower in this foreign setting as he more deeply absorbs a U.S. culture with which they are not unfamiliar, having heard much about the States--or the "stets"--back home. Yet this is "another planet" to the narrator, where she shifts and roams, gathering up experiences to take back. Cerebral, dotted with unusual vocabulary--"cadastral," "ruderal"--the stories capture fleeting ideas and moments, sometimes hazily. Above all there's an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future. An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance.

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Starred review from August 19, 2024
De Kerangal’s masterful collection (after Eastbound) examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives. In “Bivouac,” a translator reminisces about her first trip to Paris alone as a teen, where she stayed with her mother’s glamorous friend, who lost her fiancé years earlier in a helicopter accident. In the eerie “Nevermore,” a voice actor records Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and encounters a fantastical bird outside the studio. “A Light Bird” centers on a man whose daughter confronts him about needing to delete an answering machine greeting recorded by his now deceased wife. The narrator of “Ontario,” having traveled to Toronto for a literary festival, gazes at Lake Ontario from her hotel window and reflects on how she associates the word “lake” with “death” rather than a more appropriate word like “canoe.” Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map—a dentist wears a canoe pendant in “Bivouac,” and the “Nevermore” narrator’s voice is described as a “light canoe on a dark ocean”—prompting readers to consider de Kerangal’s themes of transience and the flow of memories. This understated volume packs a powerful punch.