Barrelhouse Reviews: Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. Jessica Moore

Reviewed by Samantha Kathryn O’Brien

Archipelago Books / February 2023 / 137 pp

In classical Russian literature, railways mirror an anxious, forward thrust into an uncertain future. Bordered spaces of quiet contemplation, they are physical signifiers of modernity, political repression, and dehumanization. Trains are merciless executioners, taking the lives of our favorite protagonists, as they are capsules of containment and compression. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad from the late 19th century and into the 20th century was critical in Russia’s effort to establish influence in East Asia, and at that time, trains came to represent Russia’s immensity, both as a growing colonial power and in terms of literal, geographic space. Today, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, with its westernmost terminus situated in Moscow and its easternmost out in the Siberian hinterlands of Vladivostok, spans 5,867 miles and eight time zones. Due to the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia in February of 2022, Maylis de Kerangal’s 2012 novel (translated by Jessica Moore in 2023) seems prescient. Today, global anxiety around Russia is as pertinent as ever. That anxiety is, in any case, a language that de Kerangal’s protagonists Aliocha and Hélène share. 

Aliocha, of Eastbound, is a twenty-year-old Russian conscript aboard the Trans-Siberian Railroad. For him, the sense of looming threat is perhaps less the result of the war awaiting, of military engagement, and more of Siberia as an abstraction, an imaginative landscape. It is a “forbidden perimeter, a silent space, faceless, a black hole.” Its immensity and profound unknowability frighten Aliocha to his core. With every pulse and beat of the train, he throttles closer to a fate that is, at once, terrifying and impossible to comprehend. The threat is disembodied—indeed, the narrative thrust is that of the walls closing in on him—as well as embodied through the provodiskna, the train attendant. Aliocha suspects the provodiskna has probably been working on the train “since forever,” and therefore anticipates Aliocha’s every maneuver. With her military-style Russian appearance and her peroxide blond hair, he fears her “gravid body contains the entire country.” When he decides to defect, he believes, she is attuned to his tricks, and from her he fears capture. 

In Aliocha’s attempt at escape, he finds a potential accomplice, a foreigner (Hélène). He imagines, hopes, that she is American, a woman who’s “not afraid of wide open spaces and who takes long-distance trains,” and is dismayed to discover that she is from France. “Just an itty-bitty country,” he laments—will she be a worthy accomplice against the immense threat that is “Siberia”? For her, too, far-East Russia is more of a conceptual space than a tangible reality: 

She has a tragic and patchy image of Russia, a jumbled montage involving the fatal fall of the baby carriage down a monumental staircase in Odessa  the firebrand in the eyes of Michael Strogoff, the gymnast Elena Mukhiva spinning on the uneven bars, the fevered face of Lenin as he addresses the crowd, the Soviet Union flag at the top of the Reichstag, doctored photos, Brezhnev’s eyebrows and Solzhenitsyn’s beard, La Moulette at the Odeon cinema on spring night, thousands of prisoners digging a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea, Nureyev leaping across the border in an airport, a parade of tanks on the Red Square… would she have even spoken to him if he hadn’t been the man from the forbidden country?

Again and again, de Kerangal invokes the imagined threat of the forbidden country; the sense of throttling deeper and deeper into its depths contributes to the feelings of entrapment and desperation throughout the novel. Aliocha and Hélène are haunted by this almost-knowing, this precipice of understanding Russia. de Kerangal’s stated efforts to place herself into the unknown in her writing appear subtextually in these characters. Her writing isn’t overburdened with research or laborious exposition; instead, the book offers the chilling sense that she is only brushing the edges of her knowledge.

Hélène is also an escapee of sorts. We learn this in her own internal monologue, that her decision to flee her Muscovite lover was invisible, interior. The mirroring of Aliocha and Hélène’s intentions also remains invisible, due to the lack of a common tongue. Instead, Aliocha and Hélène cobble together a strange, non-verbal intimacy (that is at times, coupled with intense hostility) that relies almost entirely on body language and implication.

For de Kerangal, translation is perhaps at the heart of the story’s meaning-making. In an interview on her novel The Heart, she describes the translator as co-author, and yet states that passing on her work to a translator is essentially an act of abandonment. As I am not a French reader, it perhaps means very little to say that Jessica Moore’s stunning translation strikes me as authoritative. Then again, perhaps it is the very gap inherent in literary translation that lies at the heart of a story like this.

The Russian train is a space in which interior battles take physical form; so it is for Aliocha. In one moment he is one of hundreds of conscripts, pressed up against the walls of a train throttling towards Siberia, clamoring for windowspace, and the next moment he is struck with a plan: “The idea suddenly goes through the boy, a flash of lightning-like certainty tangible as a stone, and at this exact moment the Trans-Siberian rushes into a tunnel, run away, get out as fast as possible, defect, jump.” In an instant, Aliocha transforms from a submissive conscript to a hunted deserter.

This brief novel is, at once, spare and complex. Due to the austerity of the setting—a four-walled train and its small ensemble as well as the distinctly present-absence of the imagined Russia beyond–one could almost imagine the story as a painting. In the game of cat and mouse that ensues, Aliocha and Helene try a number of tactics to outsmart their pursuers, from swapping clothes, to hiding in the bathroom, to attempting to flee the train and vanish into some anonymous Russian city. With each failed attempt, the pressure in the novel builds, and the protagonists begin to reveal themselves to one another in all their depravity and humanity. Their strained interactions dramatize the novel’s central question: how well can we really know the “other”? To what extent are we all just strangers on a train?

Indeed, ekphrasis is a crucial practice for de Kerangal, who from 2019 to 2021, served as the first ever Musee d’Orsay writer-in-residence. In a video of her reflections on this residency, she speaks emphatically on the narrative potential of paintings. These are short, intense narratives, she says, gesturing to Monet’s Corner of the Apartment (and here, one cannot help but think of Eastbound)—they give us stories, and we can give them stories too. 

What is perhaps most stunning about this novel is the narrative potential available at every turn, despite the lack of a significant plot. Even to each other, Aliocha and Hélène’s faces are canvases to be read and interpreted, as is the vast Siberian landscape, visible primarily through the train window. The fact that the narratives conjured by Aliocha and Hélène about Siberia and one another are only just that—stories—somehow makes the process of reading all the more dynamic.

Samantha Kathryn O’Brien is a writer from New Jersey. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Washington Square Review, Los Angeles Review, Cagibi, and others. Currently, she lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is working on her MFA and teaching first-year writing.