As a character, she gives Li a chance to explore the strange power of the myths we form about the people who shape us. Li depicts Fabienne as almost superhuman in both marvelous and terrible ways. The dominant Fabienne issues commands that Agnès, seemingly in thrall to her friend’s superior imagination, is compelled to act out. To others.” This magical image is Agnès’s way of describing the sway her friend Fabienne has over her, an insatiable urge to disturb the order of things that shapes the dynamic between the two girls.
Early on, its narrator, Agnès, declares, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart … That crystal in place of a heart-it makes things happen. Though it is ostensibly a realist historical novel about the lives of women and girls in mid-century France, as its fablelike title indicates, The Book of Goose secretly dwells in the realm of fairy tale. Then there’s the too-easy comparison with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet-a comparison that is really only helpful in orienting the reader toward the themes of desire and self-determination that they share.īut take the knife that Li offers, cut through all these outer trappings, and you find something much more mysterious. There are many ways of avoiding this challenge-of being distracted from Li’s real project-because of just how many elements she throws into this novel: its primary setting in a bleak, rural postwar France its dip into the English boarding-school novel a take on the well-worn trope of “female friendship” the possibility of a queer relationship never made explicit a commentary on the capriciousness of fame. Why not, I wonder.” This feels like a challenge-to take a knife to this book, the seventh work of fiction from the Chinese-born author, cutting right through it to reveal what’s at its heart. “There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. “You can slash a book,” says the narrator of Yiyun Li’s new novel, The Book of Goose.
0 kommentar(er)
