Maylis De Kerangal

Jessica Moore

From Wellcome Prize winner Maylis de Kerangal comes a fast-paced story of two fugitives set on the Trans-Siberian railway, where a desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with a French woman will offer him an escape. In sensual prose evoking jazz music and infused with a sense of surreal softness, Maylis de Kerangal brings the filthy, violent circumstances of Aliocha’s journey into sharp focus.

‘The fever burning through this story, its suspense and its lyrical escapes don’t curb its sensuality, and precision. [Kerangal’s] language has an incredible driving force. It is both like a stone made up of many crystals, mixing registers with fluidity, and juxtaposing the poetic and the trivial. The whole thing has a unique rhythm, a sense of breathless speed: the sort of graceful rockslide that only she can pull off. In flux between interior and exterior, this is the perfect voyage.’ – Le Monde des Livres

Eastbound

Maylis de Kerangal

A twenty-four-hour whirlwind of death and life. This is the heart of Simon Limbeau. This is the black box of his twenty-year-old body, circulating five litres of blood each minute, compressing itself a hundred thousand times each day. No bigger than a fist, yet it is capable of pumping blood through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels. This heart has leaped, swelled, melted, sunk, and now, on this glacial winter night, it rests and recharges, readying itself for the day ahead. 5.50 a.m. This is his heart. And here is its story.

Mend the Living

The Whole Singing Ocean

Poetry. Part lyric, part memoir, EVERYTHING, NOW, Jessica Moore's heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-Fran++ois Beauchemin's Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity. The fact at the core of EVERYTHING, NOW is the death of Moore's lover in a sudden, tragic bicycle accident. But rather than simply detail such a catastrophe, Moore strives to bring memory back to full color. How do we hold on to what totally escapes us? Where does love end and grief begin? Are they one and the same thing in a circumstance such as this? "EVERYTHING, NOW—part lyric, part memoir—confronts the brutality of loss and resurrects a life by means of deeply felt narrative and vividly rendered images. Jessica Moore has constructed a moving testament to a much-loved partner and, by extension, to all those who have died far too soon."—Jane Urquhart

Everything, Now

The Whole Singing Ocean is a poetic narrative that circles around the central story of a boy and a whale, and the 2013 investigation into the École en bateau, a French countercultural “boat school,” or school at sea, which was based not only on the ideals of the sixties, but also on twisted ideas about child psychology, the theories of Foucault and an abolition of the separation between adults and children. The narrative begins with a boat builder and his encounter with a whale when he was a student of the École en bateau himself, and moves on to explore threads of philosophy, memory and various kinds of destruction, fragmentation and wholeness. The text weaves in several voices and threads of rapture and horror, as it explores adventure, childhood, abuse and environmental degradation. This work becomes a self-conscious documentation of the boat builder’s story as it unfolds, and as the narrator learns more of what happened and uncovers echoes from her own life and family history. Her discoveries cause the narrative to take some unexpected, and at times resisted, turns. Themes of memory and trauma, reliability and unreliability, binaries and magic, and the question of how to hold two very different things at once, are at the heart of this book.

Jessica Moore

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