BookBrowse Reviews Canoes by Maylis De Kerangal

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In this collection of short stories from French writer Maylis de Kerangal, characters explore their connections to the dead, to each other, and to the early humans of prehistory.

The short stories in Maylis de Kerangal's new collection, Canoes, translated from the French by Jessica Moore, are all loosely concerned with the human voice. In one story, a woman notices that her old friend's way of speaking has changed: "Her voice—in other words, the singular vibration she emitted in the atmosphere and which I would have recognized as her among thousands of others—was no longer in her body and seemed dubbed by someone else, just barely different, but different all the same." Her friend brightly explains that she wanted a job in radio, but was told that they "don't really like sugary little voices here," and set out to make her voice "lower, deeper, calmer"—more masculine. She explains that her adaptation was a feminist choice; the narrator silently disagrees.

In another story, a man's daughter begs him to change his answering machine message, which features the voice of his late wife, who died five years prior: "[C]ontrary to what you think, my grief gets stronger each time I have to hear the message," his daughter cries, "and it makes me stop calling you because I'm scared to hear it. Think of other people. Please, erase it." In another, the legendary Klang sisters collect people's voices—they "pan for voices like gold in the river," holding auditions and then recording the ones they like. Their recording project, says the narrator, is a "monumental work that aimed to restore to literature its oral aspect, to embody it, to give each text a voice all its own, the right one." The narrator's own voice, recorded reading "The Raven," is tagged by the discerning sisters as "light canoe on dark ocean."

For a collection interested in voices, though, de Kerangal's writing is not "voicey" in that other way—stylized, monological. Her narrators all basically sound the same on the page, as if they're the same person in different stages of life or different settings; the stories flow smoothly from one into the other, and reading each subsequent story deepens one's understanding of what came before.

The first in the collection, "Bivouac," is narrated by a woman experiencing headaches for reasons she can't discern: "I tried to note the commonalities in their onset… but couldn't find a pattern and had become a woman on high alert, vulnerable, precarious," she says. Desperate, she sees a dentist for a jaw examination. As the dentist waits for the mold in the narrator's jaw to set, she reads aloud an article on her phone about a 2008 archeological dig in the 15th arrondissement, where nomadic hunter-gatherers—the last of prehistory—set up a temporary camp ten thousand years prior. The mention of the 15th district reminds the narrator of a weekend she spent with her mother's widowed friend when she was a young teenager, taking the train into Paris, sleeping on the floor of a small apartment, feeling cosmopolitan and mature.

This might sound like a lot for a ten-page story—a hodgepodge plot; a forced transition into a teenage memory. But de Kerangal's writing style is engrossing and charming; lines like "Our whole organism is suspended from this see-saw," and "Yoo-hoo! Three minutes is up, and we're taking out the mold" seem imbued, to me, with a light magic. And her fascination with prehistory is infectious; in this story, she draws a straight, subtle line between our nomadic ancestors, who could not escape death, evolution, or the progress of civilization, and our contemporary selves. Her stories are a narrativization of the process of understanding oneself as part of a lineage of everything that has come before you—a process that is, in the world of these stories, both beautiful and necessary.

As such, de Kerangal's characters are rarely interested in the future; they prefer looking backwards. Death is a specter in much of the collection, and characters are often looking for a way—or, if not actively looking, come to find a way—to move on from something that has happened to them. In "Mustang," the best and longest story in the book—it's almost a hundred pages, more of a novella than a short story—the narrator moves with her partner and child from Paris to Golden, Colorado, partly so that her partner can attend the famous School of Mines and partly to take their minds off a recent tragedy they suffered. Golden is a little Gold Rush town at the foot of the Rockies with an almost movie set-like Wild West aesthetic; for the narrator, the town and the school

"set off the great narrative of origins… and used this mythical substrate to tell the eternal story of civilization and progress, or how the white man made himself master of the earth and its riches and invented things to exploit its materials, how he imposed his law, how and at what price: force, mud, and Colt 45s, greed, violence: the attempted annihilation of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains."

The narrator is interested in the far history of this place, like the dinosaur fossils and stones at the minerologist's store, as well as the comparatively recent Indigenous art and history. But she also becomes entranced by the symbols of American domination and civilization that she decries: the Mustang car her partner buys; the handgun she finds in the glove compartment of her driving teacher. In the end, the machine betrays her—she loses control of the car and crashes it—and what she's left with are the more primitive tools and artifacts: the stone she received from the minerologist, the pottery she made at a class at the rec center. Only then is she ready to return to Paris.

These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational. Their preoccupations are different than what I normally encounter in fiction, but the feelings and dynamics that de Kerangal describes are familiar and convincingly rendered: the awkwardness between two women in their twenties who used to be close friends and somehow aren't anymore; an older sister's pride and sympathy for her stuttering younger brother. The narrator of the last story, an investigator on a government task force for UFOs, has a "penchant for the faraway absolute" of space but also an interest in "the complexity of human testimony": "these stories of sightings, these prosaic and fragile little narratives," are, for her, "the true substance of cosmic wonder." It's a description that applies equally to de Kerangal's own work, which traffics in a kind of matter-of-fact, unsentimental wonder—the kind of work that makes you more alert, critical, and curious.

This review first ran in the November 6, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.