In 1954, Françoise Sagan scandalised literary France with Bonjour Tristesse, a slender story of adolescent betrayal and revenge written when she was a young person. In her sly, profound new novel, award-winning writer Yiyun Li imagines a pair of 13-year-olds whose inky scheming will see them break into print in that very same period with calamitous outcomes.
Greatest associates Agnès and Fabienne are so completely different they full one another; the previous obedient, devoted, the latter feral however sensible. They’ve grown up collectively within the impoverished French village of Saint Rémy, whose mud and meadows, madmen and drunks anchor The E book of Goose, infusing its imagery and its aphoristic musings, although Agnès narrates it from the vantage level of a really completely different life greater than a decade on.
What sees the ladies by is their more and more elaborate video games of make-believe, and when Fabienne means that they write a ebook collectively, it appears to Agnès, whose job it turns into to transcribe her buddy’s tales, like simply one other lark. Besides that with assist from the native postmaster they entice the eye of a Paris writer and Agnès – who ought to be credited, Fabienne insists, because the writer of Les Enfants Heureux (a macabre title provided that it’s all about lifeless youngsters) – is quickly being feted by the media as a peasant prodigy, ultimately discovering herself a digital prisoner at a ending faculty in England.
For all its floor lushness, this can be a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the character of actuality and the reality quotient of reality, reminiscence and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – a lot extra “deadly”, as Agnès places it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight. There’s room, too, for a spiky, typically droll critique of what it takes out of an writer to be revealed and compelled to interact with the surface world.
In a textual content resonant with echoes of tales as numerous as Cinderella and My Sensible Good friend, in addition to authors together with Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor, Agnès’s voice may belong to no one else. Finally, she’ll be compelled to start writing in earnest and in so doing will uncover her personal company. Fairly what this implies for her defining bond with Fabienne, and the currents of feeling and energy which have hitherto formed it, is resolved in an electrifying graveyard denouement, that includes a glinting knife and howls into the darkish.
Li, who writes in English and teaches at Princeton, grew up in China and spoke in a latest New York Instances interview about discovering a present for writing propaganda as a young person, and her horror at discovering she may transfer an viewers to tears by channelling patriotic cliches. That have certainly fuels the thrilling complexity of The E book of Goose’s relationship with the literary impulse and its typically sullied motives, together with the calls for positioned on these presumed to have a facility for phrases.
It’s to Li’s credit score that the structural cleverness of her seventh work of fiction doesn’t obscure its defining drama, the connection between Agnès and Fabienne; as a substitute a elegant closing passage attracts it out into the open, permitting Agnès – who was at all times extra amanuensis than prodigy – to signal her identify to the “actual” story of the 2 of them, with all the probabilities and limitations that that phrase entails.
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