Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

The Trans-Siberian Railway running
along the shore of Lake Baikal

A sense of disorientation pervades this short novel. 

Eastbound was written by French author Maylis de Kerangal, published in French in 2012 and in English by Archipelago Books in 2023, translated by Jessica Moore. 

The basic story is this: Aliocha is a young man who has been conscripted into the Russian army. Despite efforts to avoid military service, he finds himself on the Trans-Siberian railway rattling across the endless taiga to some unknown Siberian destination for his military training. Desperate to escape, he strikes up a relationship with a foreigner, a French woman who is also riding the train. They become co-conspirators, hiding Aliocha from the vicious sergeant Letchov for the duration of the trip so that Aliocha might escape and be free.  

The novel begins with disorientation. The opening sentence of the story is "These guys come from Moscow and don't know where they're going." So already we are on a journey into nowhere. To pass the endless time, the conscripts bully one another aimlessly. The disconnection is profound. Early in the book, two nameless conscripts come up behind Aliocha on the train and begin to harass him, pushing and punching. At first he plays the victim. But eventually Aliocha turns and with sudden violence punches one, sending him sprawling to the floor. The buddy, left standing there, "looks at his friend lying there among puddles of beer and cigarette butts, looks him up and down, expressionless, and then even gives him a kick in the side, turns on his heel and abandons him there" (15-16). No good samaritans here, only profound isolation and alienation. Everyone is a stranger.

Aliocha himself is disoriented. Wanting desperately to escape, he looks for a map listing the train stops, but he can't find one -- talk about a classic existential dilemma (18). He is simply lost on this train in a world of brutes and sadists. He loses track of the days and the time. He doesn't know how long he has been on the train. His memory is patchy and he can't string it together, "Aliocha concentrates hard to locate a few temporal reference points . . . .but fails to restore the sequence of nights and days since Moscow, fails to identify what the date is today" (91). He is disoriented about the people around him and the world in general. When he first encounters the French woman Hélène, he confuses her for an American perhaps "from Wyoming or Arizona" (38). So he knows nothing, and even confesses that he knows nothing about western women (69). And because of the language barrier, they can only communicate in pantomime.

Hélène the other protagonist is also disoriented. She too is trying to escape, from Siberia where she moved with her boyfriend yet now feels alienated, "how difficult it was for her living here, out of place, out of her own climate, her language, blind and deaf she would say over and over, laughing, and alone (55). Impulsively she takes the train, trying to leave Russia behind but going in the wrong direction, eastbound toward the sea. Her own sense of the world is disoriented, "she has a tragic and patchy image of Russia, a jumbled montage (59) of books and snippets of images from media and the news. There is no integration no wholeness, just a jumble of phenomenological perceptions. She also is devoid of purpose. She doesn't know where she is going or why. She chooses to help Aliocha seemingly on a whim. She doesn't know him and doesn't know why she even decided to intervene. "What's done is done," she tells herself (50). It's just a choice, made "without hesitation, without even weighing his requiest"  that sets things in motion, creates a bond between these two strangers. Aliocha muses that "she may not even know why she did it, maybe just for fun, to play the game" (69).

Meanwhile, the train rolls through the endless Russian landscape. The landscape through which they move is also bewildering, without human scale. It takes on many meanings throughout the journey. It is an abyss in which one disappears, a "blurry territory from which no one returns" (10).  It can be an inhuman and alien landscape, the endless taiga, "the skin of the Earth, the epidermis of Russia" (41), it is the "realm of bears" (48). It is rapturous sublime of Lake Baikal, so mythic that the one compliment Aliocha has ever given to a woman is that her eyes are like Lake Baikal (71) - a lake that he nor she has ever seen. In one of the best descriptions in the book, the train compartments erupt in hot-cultured expressions of ecstatic joy as Lake Baikal comes into view (85-88). 

On the train, Aliocha and Hélène exist in a sort of timelessness or jumbled time - time stretches and snaps, slowing and elongating then suddenly speeding up "the train that rolls unerringly, crossing time zones one by one, breaking up time as it charges through space; the train that compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with earth's clocks (92). The passengers have "little by little renounced the alignment of their biological clocks with the terrestrial cycle of night/day/night, tick=tock-tick-tock and something else in the had given way, freeing an unknown temporality, elastic and floating" (124-25). This confusion of time is deeply disorienting, loosening their grip on what is real, what is happening. "Their REM sleep time has been whittled down as well, so they have trouble committing to memory the things they are experiencing" (125).

Yet within this profound disorientation, a precise drama unfolds. These strangers, thrown in this train together as the bewildering world rushes past, enact their own play, take sides, make choices, and risk all.  

This is French existentialism at its finest. We are all riding this train speeding into unknown, rushing through a bewildering world. Thrown in medias res  among these strangers - whom we don't really know, with whom we can only pantomime and not really communicate, just thrown together in this crazy ride with us. And none of us really know why. There is only the drama on the train, only the now, only the choice to act in the moment. All we can do is reach out, take a risk to connect as best we can with another stranger. All we can do is to act, to create our own story, to find a meaning and purpose in what we make of the world around us.