Strangers on a Russian train

The paperback novel Eastbound is deceptively modest. It's thin, only about 130 pages, and small, roughly 5 by 6 inches. It's more like a long short story or a novella than a free-standing novel. I'm impressed that the editor at Archipelago Books had the wit to acquire it and that The New York Times realized that it was worth reviewing as they did in 2023:

"When this brief lyrical novel was first published in France, in 2012, Russia’s war against Ukraine was no more than a psychotic gleam in Vladimir Putin’s eye. Today, Eastbound is a story of our time. In a book whose only battlefield is a cross-continental train, [the author] Maylis de Kerangal vividly evokes the Russian military’s disorder and brutality and the desperation of the men who have been forced to serve in it."

Virtually all of the action takes place on an eastbound Trans-Siberian train. There are two central characters,  Aliocha, a 20-year-old conscript who decides to desert rather than serve in Siberia, and Hélène, a French woman who decides to leave her Russian lover rather than live with him at a hydroelectric station in central Russia. Aliocha speaks no French; Hélène knows only a few words of Russian. Nevertheless, they connect under plausible circumstances and she decides to help him evade his vicious sergeant on the train.

Because Aliocha and Hélène cannot speak the novel has virtually no dialogue. We learn almost everything we know about the people and their situation by what they do and what de Kerangal tells us in Jessica Moore's smooth translation: "These guys come from Moscow and don't know where they're going. There's a crowd of them, more than a hundred, young, white—pallid, even—wan and shorn, their arms veiny and eyes pacing the train car, camouflage pants and briefs, torsos caged in khaki undershirts, thin chains with crosses bouncing against their chests, guys lining the walls in the passageways and corridors, sitting, standing, stretched out on the berths, letting their arms dangle, their feet dangle, letting their bored resignation dangle in the void."

While those sentences, the first two in the book, engaged my interest initially, I did not expect to become so invested in Aliocha and Hélène, to care about them as much as I did. The details of the train, the characters, the passing landscape all ring true. I believe that a young Russian conscript and an older French woman would, in a similar situation, act the way Aliocha and Hélène did.  An extraordinary book.