Yiyun Li's THE BOOK OF GOOSE

It's sheer coincidence that I got my turn with my public library's copy of Yiyun Li's latest, The Book of Goose, a novel set partially in postwar France, right near the beginning of my second focus month on literature in translation, February from the French. It's not quite an appropriate choice for this theme in that it was originally written in the same language in which I normally read which is not French, but let's call it French-adjacent in honor of its setting, shall we?

Anyway, The Book of Goose. A book that was never going to be possible for an extremely online doofus like me to read without at least occasionally thinking of the magnificent Untitled Goose Game even though the text establishes a somber tone right away as our narrator, Agnès, announces the death in childbirth of the person she tells us is the most important character in what is to follow. A death of which she learned in a vaguely passive-aggressive letter from her mother in far-off St Rémy, France that is mostly about the birth of that mother's latest great-granchild (it is left ambiguous until much later whether or not said great-grandchild's birth is what killed Fabienne, or if that was some other baby). 

Whether the news is meant as another nudge about Agnès' own duty to provide more grandchildren is left mostly unexamined for a while; more importantly, we learn that Agnès now lives in Pennsylvania and married a nice man, Earl, who cannot father children but who makes Agnès happy anyway. As she observes, "People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler."

But long before that range of decisions confronts her is her childhood in France with her bestie, who she maintains, kept her from being ordinary:

All the girls, other than me, wanted the same things: to own a pair of stockings so their legs would not look bare and childish in their humiliating ankle socks; to have the best notebooks to record song lyrics, those sickeningly sweet words of dreams and loves and hearts; to be praised by the teachers, but more importantly, to be admired and envied by one another; to catch the attention of the right boys. I would have been one of them had Fabienne not been in my life. What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.

Agnés, by their 13th year, is still going to school but Fabienne has dropped out long ago, after Fabienne's mother died in childbirth, yet another victim of rural France's post-World-War-II deprivation and poverty. While Agnès continues her education, Fabienne works her father's meager land and tends goats and geese and other livestock. They mostly hang out in the evenings, in the local cemetery, where it's easier to look at the stars and where they never stop hoping to encounter ghosts.

Soon Fabienne gets it in her head that the two of them are going to write a book, and the very recently widowed postman, M. Devaux, is going to help them. He is crotchety and ugly and still very much bereaved but the kids pretty much bully him into being their editor and, eventually, helping them get it published. The stories, Agnès tells us, are all made up by Fabienne; Agnès is merely the amanuensis, frantically taking Fabienne's dictation until they have a collection of short stories they title Les Enfants Heureux (The Happy Children) with M. Devaux's bitter irony: all the children in Fabienne's fables die in them.

At Fabienne's insistence, only Agnès' name will appear on the cover, so when it comes time to bring the little peasant author to meet prospective publishers in Paris with M. Devaux, only Agnès is to go. Bidding good-bye to her parents and older brother, Jean (a survivor of a German POW camp, still stick-thin and bedridden since coming home), she boards a train for her big adventure but not without reminding us that Jean once took the same train away from their countryside and almost didn't come home. 

Happiness is very fleeting in The Book of Goose.

It was impossible not to think of Gloria from Bye Bye Blondie's own train rides into the capital. A generation later than Agnès, Gloria wound up seeing her artistic efforts taken away from her and exploited. Would the same be Agnès' fate?

Eh, not quite.

Before we know it, Les Enfants Heureux is a publishing sensation, Agnès a bright new star, and her book is translated into other languages, including English. Meanwhile, Fabienne has concocted their second book, a romance about a young woman and a postman, and has contrived to get the real postman, M. Devaux, banished from their lives. And in faraway England, our half-invented peasant prodigy has attracted the notice of a formidable woman who wants Agnès for her finishing school and I finally realize what all this has been reminding me of.

Agnès is every inch a Margaret Atwood heroine, attractive and capable in her own right but weak of personality, easily enthralled to a stronger will. Her life to this point has been lived almost entirely in subjection to Fabienne, whom she repeatedly refers to as her other self. Fabienne condescends to do all her thinking for her and patronizes her as someone who doesn't know how to make things happen. This dynamic is at the very core of most of Atwood's fiction and is a big part of why I have lost my taste for her. But this is not an Atwood novel, so I kept on going, wanting to see how far Fabienne could reach with a chunk of France and all of the English Channel between her and Agnès. Would she maintain control, or would she have to yield to Mrs. Townsend and Her School?

The last 20% or so of the novel, in which all of this should be wrapped up at least somewhat, does so, but does so in what feels like a rush. While we've lingered long on Agnès' year as a literary celebrity and finishing school student, her life between this year and the time of her "once again writing another book with Fabienne's (posthumous) help" is barely worth a mention as far as our narrator is concerned. She meets and marries Earl in a paragraph or two, for instance; her relationships with three other men (one imaginary and very interesting, admittedly) are drawn out across numerous chapters and allowed to complicate her situation, but Earl is simply her off-page Prince Charming and they are happily ever after I guess? Just Agnès and Earl and her flock of geese?

So if that sort of thing bothers you, this might not be your book. But if you're interested in a look at post-war life in rural France? Eh. What this book is mostly concerned with is Agnès and Fabienne and How They Made Themselves Real, which isn't going to be everybody's cup of re-used teabag-made tea. I still don't know how much I liked it, to be honest. I know I didn't hate it, but, again, eh.