Canoes
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- US$13.99
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- US$13.99
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From the author of Eastbound, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year
A colorful cast of female characters contends with UFOs, sonic waves, and the legend of Buffalo Bill in a spellbinding novella and 7 short stories about the mysteries of place and language
“The translation of any of Maylis de Kerangal’s books is a gift.” — Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker
"De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch." — Publishers Weekly, starred review
Ricocheting off of the book’s exhilarating central novella and 7 short stories, the women we meet in Canoes are by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected.
“When did I start placing myself in the fable?” a young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband’s voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.
The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave readers forever altered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
