‘Eastbound’ by Maylis de Kerangal    (2012) – 127 pages            Translated from the French by Jessica Moore

‘Eastbound’ is the story of two people boarded on a train traveling through Siberia to the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok. One is a young Russian guy named Aliocha who is with a large group of other young guys who have been conscripted into the Russian army and now must report for duty. These guys are riding on the train in third class at the back of the train. Aliocha is not at all happy about being conscripted into the army and while on the train he decides to desert.

“Or maybe he’d take advantage of a stop in some station to hightail it outta there: the guys would get out on the platform, he’d follow the crowd, pretend to be buying a pack of smokes, step away quickly and erase himself into the darkness while dodging the rounds of night watchmen.”

The other main character is a still young French woman named Helene who is in her late thirties and riding near the front of the train in first class. Helene moved to Russia, to the town of Yenisey, to be with her boyfriend Anton. Anton just got a big promotion to manage a hydropower plant in Yenisey so now he says they must stay there. Helene wants to be back in Paris and decides to run away on the train, the Trans-Siberian train to escape to Vladivostok, as far away from Paris as possible.

“Who would be crazy enough to go from Krasnoyarsk to Vladivostok in order to get back to Paris? Why?”

Helene and Aliocha meet on the train.

“It seems at this moment the train speeds up, a slight jolt unbalances them, she’s thrown against him and he steadies her, she laughs, not bothered, a French woman indeed, and asks Aliocha where he’s headed,”

Helene decides to help this boy desert. Both are running away from something, Helene from her boyfriend and Aliocha from forced conscription. Helene lets Aliocha stay in her compartment, to help him desert in the next town stop or the next. Aliocha fails to escape in a couple of towns they pass through, and Helene has second thoughts about helping him.

“all she has to do is to look at the soldier sleeping on the bunk to feel that his presence is absurd, out of place, and to see that something’s off here, something’s short-circuited.”

The train passes by Lake Baikal, the deepest and apparently one of the most beautiful freshwater lakes in the world.

“We Russians may be poor, but we have Baikal!”

So, as well as the story of these two people on a train, we get some beautiful word pictures of the Siberian landscape in this novella ‘Eastbound’. I thought the entire novella was well constructed and well written. I will be looking for more works by Maylis de Kerangal to read.

Grade :    A