Canoes

Maylis de Kerangal has long been interested in how we get from one time and place to another—via organ transplant, painting, train travel (in Eastbound, also translated by Jessica Moore and released in English by Archipelago in 2023)—in essence, the art of translation. Traversing de Kerangal’s native France and the North American continent, her latest short story collection Canoes continues this investigation. Its tumbling, first-person prose is littered with tangible and intangible artifacts that (dis)orient—bones, teeth, rocks, memories, and most of all, voices. (Moore notes that these stories started coming into existence “just as the first mandates caused mouths to disappear.”) All of Canoes’s unnamed narrators are women, crossing paths mostly with other women. And regardless of whether they’re going through the motions of everyday life or contemplating the mysteries of the great beyond (often the former prompts the latter), they always seem to speak at an arm’s length from the world.

The collection opens with “Bivouac,” in which a translator, while at a dental appointment, reminisces about an aunt whose late fiancé perished in a helicopter accident and left behind no physical traces. In “Stream and Iron Filings,” the narrator learns, much to her own resulting ambivalence, that her old friend Zoe is undergoing coaching to transform her “sugary little voice,” a disadvantage in radio broadcasting as “the higher your voice, the more people perceive you as fragile, nervous, weak.” It’s been scientifically proven that the frequency of women’s voices has dropped in the last half century—a social adaptation, Zoe blithely remarks at the end. The characters appear resigned to the currents of fate, though de Kerangal herself is anything but a nihilist.

The centerpiece, “Mustang,” follows a Parisian woman who moves to small town Colorado with her academic husband Sam and “the Kid.” The novella tracks her vertiginous plunge into the hyperreal heart of America; references to American cultural products abound, deliberately sought out in their new American life. Sam uses his paltry fellowship stipend to purchase the titular Mustang (the same model as Steve McQueen’s in Bullitt, he says). “This country … we knew it already, we had a picture of it—movies, TV series, ads … a continuum of scenes, landscapes, and faces scrolled past in the back of our brains, subliminal, so much did it seem like we had already been here, that we were back, drifting in a dilated present…” Like other characters in the collection, the woman shares a fascination with indigenous culture and history. Yet here Native Americans only exist in museums, street names, and popular legend.

Unmoored from almost all touchpoints of her former existence and increasingly estranged from Sam—a development signified by his voice becoming unrecognizable—the narrator must find new ways to pass days largely spent alone. Importantly, she learns how to drive with the help of an eccentric instructor. While her work at her old map publishing job consisted of detachedly examining and decoding landscapes from above, this new horizontal vantage point from the driver’s seat grants the land and its inhabitants their own life. De Kerangal particularly excels at this form of meandering, observational writing; her narrator catalogues the unfamiliar world outside her windshield: rows of suburban homes (“I am an American house, the front yard landscaped, the back a mess”), towering Rockies, used car lots, the austere, mythological beauty of the West. In spite of various efforts to assert her agency, the overall effect still amounts to being a passenger along for the ride, as she periodically asks to no avail: “Are we there yet?” These neuroses culminate, in Ballardian fashion, with the narrator driving the Mustang off the highway and totaling it in a Safeway parking lot below.

As the brief summaries of the preceding stories should indicate, de Kerangal is never boring, at least to start with. Unfortunately, the premises contained within the final section of Canoes, while intriguing on paper, resemble gestural, at times eerie, portraiture more than fully realized stories. In “Nevermore,” two sisters renowned for their collection of recorded voices invite the narrator to their studio to read aloud Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” In “A Light Bird,” a woman attempts to convince her father to delete her dead mother’s voicemail message, which he listens to obsessively. Recent high school graduates gather in a field to yell in celebration in “After;” in “Ontario,” a woman attends an indigenous language convention in Toronto; finally, “Arianespace” explores the “complexity of human testimony” as a journalist interviews a woman who purports to have sighted a UFO.

We are all just trying to find our way forward, even when the path is convoluted or requires us to first double back, de Kerangal proclaims. Canoes, then, is an exercise in leaving a trace of contemporary life, in capturing the frequency of the loneliness that inevitably accompanies those who take up perpetual residence in transitory states.