"Eastbound": Taking Language Seriously

In Maylis de Kerangal's novella, a conscript fleeing the army and a woman who will shelter or expose him meet on the Trans-Siberian railway.

When someone casually asks what a piece of literary fiction is “about”, giving a satisfying answer is often difficult – if they’re asking what happens in the plot, the answer is often “not much”. In Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound, however, the answer is far more involved and exciting: this novella reads like a thriller, in which a Russian conscript, travelling the Trans-Siberian railway, attempts to flee military service by hiding in the cabin of a Frenchwoman who might be on his side. Not sharing a common tongue, varying degrees of trust, body language, and brutish coercion become their lingua franca. And it’s in the idea of language that we find the deepest answer to the question of what Eastbound is about.

From the first sentence, we are in the hands of a writer who values the weight of each word on her page. The novella opens, in Jessica Moore’s translation, with: “These guys come from Moscow and don’t know where they’re going.” Everything is balanced here between opposing notions:…