A Review of Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

Once upon a time, my neighborhood had a certain urban fairy-tale charm about it. There were family-owned restaurants and green grocers and Italian bakeries with coal-fired ovens. Brownstones and bookstores and bars with tin ceilings and poets for patrons lined the cobbled streets. Now it’s a strange mix of glossy designer boutiques, ratty CBD outlets with blinking LED signs and empty storefronts. The last Chinese takeout restaurant closed a few years ago, and where one of the green grocers once stood, you’ll find something called Player's Cafe, owned by Lotto.com and described on its website as "a modern convenience store that is a one-stop shop for coffee, lottery tickets, scratchers, snacks, gifts & more."

So it’s especially heartening that the bookstore Three Lives & Company still endures. Opened in 1978 in the West Village by three neighborhood women (they’re who the shop is named for, not the work of fiction by Gertrude Stein), Three Lives was once described by the New York Times, as “the Platonic ideal of a sweet, civilized and wonderfully curated store with a literate staff who really like books.” It occupies a building once painted by Edward Hopper and manages to be both a landmark and a lovely place to spend an afternoon.

Our family has a tradition of exchanging Three Lives gift certificates at Christmas, and this year, I took the one my son gave me to buy a book I’d had on my reading list called Eastbound. Written by French author Maylis de Kerangal and translated by Jessica Moore, it had intrigued me since I’d first heard of it. Even the slim, square shape of it made me want to know more.

The plot

Eastbound tells the story of a chance encounter on a train, and its 127 pages brim with tension and oppositions. The protagonist is Aliocha, part of a group of loud and jostling young Russian conscripts jammed into into the third-class cars of the Trans-Siberian Railway on their way to report for duty in Vladivostok thousands of miles away. Too poor to buy his way out of his fate, Aliocha agonizes over what awaits him, imagining everything from having his genitals burned with cigarettes to being forced to lick toilets.

When he’s beaten by his fellow conscripts for no reason but the fun of it, he decides to disembark the train at a busy station somewhere along the route, hoping to lose himself on the crowded platform and somehow start a new life.

He finds an unlikely source of help in this endeavor when he happens to meet and share a cigarette with a fellow passenger: Hélène, a French woman has just left her Russian lover, whom she met in Paris and who later brought her to desolate Siberia when he landed a job there. Helene doesn’t speak Russian but understands enough to realize Aliocha is desperate and offers to hide him from the commanding officer by letting him stay in her extra berth. 

The suspense

The plot hurtles the readers forward much like the train where the action takes place does its passengers: Will Aliocha be found out? Will Helene ultimately help him? The tension simmers: Aliocha is trapped and penniless, Helene is free and has enough money for a first-class compartment. Even the setting evokes tension. The train is cramped, dirty, confining and always rumbling forward along tracks that seem to stretch on forever. Outside is the staggering, monumental, still beauty of the Siberian landscape.

A first attempt at escape is thwarted; Helene, ready to be rid of Aliocha, is annoyed. Meanwhile, the commanding officer, alerted to Aliocha's disappearance, is getting closer to finding him. Time slows down for Aliocha while space closes in until finally he finds himself trapped in the tiny restroom with the officer just outside.

De Kerangal is masterful at sustaining the suspense in this spare, deftly plotted thriller, but there’s limpid beauty here, too. The result is something as sharp and flashing as a stiletto with an unexpected ending that resolves the many conflicts while still hinting at limitless freedom and possibility just beyond. Read it one sitting. You'll be gripped.