• Canoes
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Archipelago Books

Canoes

Canoes

by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore

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“When did I start placing myself in the fable?” A young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband’s voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.

Seven stories ricochet off of this exhilarating central novella, and in them we hear female voices by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected. The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave its reader forever altered.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861962
Pages: 197
Publication Date:

Praise

De Kerangal’s voice in Canoes and Moore’s, as it did in her translation of de Kerangal’s Eastbound, exudes exquisite language captured in balanced phrasing, nuanced word choice, and vivid specific details. Together they develop indelible characters and evoke a mesmerizing group of provocative, unforgettable stories.
—Robert Allen Papinchak, World Literature Today

This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of 'a human jawbone from the mesolithic,' an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal’s mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators’ lives.
—The New Yorker

The characters in Maylis de Kerangal’s haunting stories are impassioned detectives or solitary archaeologists taking the measure of those traces by which we find our way. In their immersive observation they track the minute changes that transform everything they thought they knew about the way we’re both jettisoned and anchored by those around us.
—Jim Shepard

Maylis de Kerangal’s [Canoes] collects small, poignant worlds. Spun in long, stream-of-consciousness sentences, her text snakes like a stream. The stories’ common thread is voices—changed, unrecognized, lost . . . Jessica Moore’s translation is seamless and poetic.
—Theodore Anderson, Newcity

De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

The stories capture fleeting ideas and moments . . . Above all there’s an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future . . . An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance.
—Kirkus Reviews

Exquisite . . . De Kerangal pairs gloriously sensuous and caustically incisive visual descriptions of interiors, cities, highways, sprawling suburbs, land, and sky with uncanny and revealing soundscapes that capture the layered timbres of nature, humans, and machines. These unusual and vibrant stories are poetically recalibrating, droll, and intriguing.
—Donna Seaman, Booklist starred review

These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational . . . [Canoes] traffics in a kind of matter-of-fact, unsentimental wonder—the kind of work that makes you more alert, critical, and curious.
—Chloe Pfeiffer, BookBrowse

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