Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

When did I start placing myself in the fable? At first I kept my distance--and maybe a certain mocking grin had even settled into the corners of my lips, the smirk of someone who's not fooled and wants everyone to know it, someone who puts on airs--up until the day when I was at Folks (the renowned main-street store that was also mimicking something, for example the grocery and hardware store of a pioneer town, and smelled like floor wax, onions, and ground coffee) and a woman with her hair braided into a crown hands me a brochure, points to Kid and then up into the air: you should go up there with the little boy! On the ceiling, all I saw was a row of pinkish neon lights. Then I peered closer at the brochure while the woman looked on, probably impatient to see my reaction: Buffalo Bill is buried at the top of the mountain that overlooks the city, the summit of the panoramas, Lookout Mountain, he's right there. I didn't know Buffalo Bill was a real person and not just a fictional character, a figure of the Far West portrayed some fifty times over in the movies, nor did I know that in 1882, he'd created Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a history of the "conquest" of the West under the Big Top, which toured in North America and Europe and was seen by more than seventy million spectators--the re-enactment depicted the version of the victors, focusing on the great mythical epic, the moustaches, gold nuggets and guns, using fictional pioneers in Stetsons, but real "natives," who played out their own attempted genocide while the federal army was massacring them in real life.

The protagonist of "Mustang," the novella that anchors French author Maylis de Kerangal's Canoes, is a French woman whose husband has relocated to Golden, Colorado, to work as an engineering professor. Her only task is to look after their young son and adjust the new American landscape, which is a demanding task indeed. She becomes obsessed with the minerals in the window at the rock shop (my God, what's more American than a rock shop?) and captivated by the mythologies of the Wild West, the cowboys and the Indians, at the same time she casts toward them a skeptical, European eye. Her husband buys a car, a green vintage Mustang, a good, garish American car, and learning to drive gives her a sense of limited freedom in this isolating place. In one very funny scene, she opens the driving instructor's glovebox to find a gun, which she then has to hide under her buttocks, and which then slips into her bag, taking it away with her because she's too embarrassed to admit to prying. That's America: the gun gets in your bag whether you like it or not.

This story got close to the magic of de Kerangal's novel Painting Time, with its liquid but precise sentences, its dogged but determined prose, that marches so unflappably through the inner workings of a mind. And I loved how, like de Tocqueville, "Mustang" gives a sense of America from an outsider's perspective, one characterized by fascination and revulsion, and the shock of being absorbed into a place that you're not sure you want to be absorbed into. America will assimilate you, whether you like it or not. The central image of the Mustang is a little on the nose, perhaps, as is the astounding crash-up that ends the story, but I was, as they say, very much along for the ride.

The other stories in Canoes are a very different sort. They're much shorter, naturally, but pointedly vignette-like, without much in the way of plot or dynamism. Sometimes they are only snapshots, some which work, and others which fall a little flat. I liked, for instance, the contrast between the recent high school graduate undertaking primal scream therapy with her friend group and her brother's halting stutter in "After," and the strange shiftiness of "Ontario," about a visit to Toronto on Decoration Day, although--or perhaps because--I'm not really sure what it's about. I was less interested in a story where a man agonizes over whether to delete his wife's voice from an answering machine, one of a few that felt very one-note. De Kerangal is deeply interested in voices and sounds: a narrator meets an old friend to discover that her voice has changed; a woman is tasked with reading Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" into a microphone and finds herself estranged from her own voice. Rooms are filled with other noises, and de Kerangal is especially sensitive to the ebb and flow of ambient noise, which either conceals or makes space for voices. 

Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal

All kinds of people set out in the violet night and converged in the city whose soda pop name jangled like thousands of corrosive little pins in their dry mouths. The wanted ads that popped up on the web called for cable riggers, ironworkers, welders, concrete form setters, asphalt paving crews, crane operators, scaffolding builders, heavy-lifting contractors, excavators--these skilled workers packed their bags in a single movement, synchronised, a tight manoeuvre, and set off by any means they could. A first wave stuffed themselves into cargo planes chartered by subcontractors who specialised in recruiting skilled laborers--these companies worked fast and with cliched racism: preferring the strong Turk, the industrious Korean, the aesthetic Tunisian, the Finnish carpenter, the Austrian cabinetmaker, and the Kenyan geometrician; avoiding the dancing Greek and the stormy Spaniard, the Japanese hypocrite and the impulsive Slav. The chosen ones, poor terrified guys dealing with their baptism by air, barfed up their guts at the back of the cabin.

An ambitious politician, recently elected the mayor of the city of Coca in Southern California, decides that his legacy will be to build an immense bridge that crosses the city's wide river. The project brings together thousands upon thousands of people, from architects and engineers to day laborers: an immense undertaking that, as much as the mayor wishes it were otherwise, cannot be credited to anyone person. In a way, Maylis de Kerangal's Birth of a Bridge, which tells the story of the bridge's rise from conception to completion, suggests a novel like William Goldman's The Spire, about the foolhardy construction of a giant spire in a medieval cathedral. Such grand projects emerge only from a kind of hubris, a belief--perhaps justified--that we can create things more lasting than bronze.

I really liked De Kerangal's novel Painting Time; I felt that her unique style--long sentences stacked with clipped phrases, separated only by speedy commas--reflected the meticulous nature of the decorative painter at its center. Birth of a Bridge is similar to Painting Time in that it takes as its subject an effort requiring great meticulousness from people whose efforts are not usually heralded: the concrete scientists, the laborers moving enormous girders, the divers and excavators who dig trenches beneath the river for the bridge's great pylons. By contrast, I was surprised by the novel's moments of grand, almost comic violence. The project engineer, stabbed by an anthropologist who's rowed for days down the river in protest of the threat the bridge poses to traditional native communities in the jungle. The laborer fleeing a life in Anchorage, where he murdered his girlfriend by drawing a bear into their apartment. The same laborer, being blackmailed by Coca's underground into blowing up the bridge.

Sometimes these moments worked, sometimes they didn't. My principal feeling about Birth of a Bridge is something that I've been feeling a lot of lately: that the focus on so many characters at the expense of a single, strong point of view keeps it from being truly engaging. The closest we have to a central character in Birth of a Bridge is Georges Diderot, the no-nonsense project engineer tasked with bringing the bridge to completion. It is Diderot, rather than the ambitious mayor, who comes closest to being the father of the bridge, the one person without whom it would not rise.

In the end, unlike in The Spire, the bridge does rise, and the world is forever changed. Change will come to the native communities in the forest, whether the anthropologist likes it or not, and change comes to the lives of Diderot and the thousands of others who take part in the "birth of the bridge."

Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

She learns to see. Her eyes burn. Fried, worked like never before, open eighteen hours a day; an average that will soon include the sleepless nights spent slogging, and other night of partying. In the morning, her eyes blink incessantly as though she'd been plopped down in full sun, lashes vibrating, butterfly wings, but at sunset she feels them weakening, her left eye limps, it slips to the side like someone sinking onto a bank of fresh grass at the edge of the path. She rinses her lids with blueberry water, places frozen teabags on them, tries gels and eyewashes, but nothing eases the sensation of tired, dry eyes, rigid pupils, nothing can stop the formation of persistent dark circles under them--her face has been branded, the stigmata of this rite of passage, of metamorphosis. Because to see, under the glass roof of the studio on the rue de Metal, high on fumes from paint and solvents, muscles sore and forehead burning, doesn't just mean keeping your eyes open to the world--to see is to engage in a pure action, create an image on a sheet of paper, an image that resembles the one the eyes have created in the brain.

Paula Karst, a young woman from Paris, whose parents once though she was bound for art school, enrolls in a Belgian school for decorative painters. Decorative painting is not like painting-painting; Painting Time is not a novel about the creative process or the ineffable genius of painters. Decorative painting is a craft, a laborious process in which the painter tries to reproduce the look and texture of marble, wood, stone. If it is done right, the painter, far from having made a statement of self-expression, finds themselves erased in the work. To reproduce the world, to make a simulacrum of it, one must know it thoroughly, as when the brilliantly talented painter and Paula's lover Jonas takes her to the quarry where the valuable marble she must copy for her school assignment has been mined for many years. To duplicate it, Paula must follow exactly the methods outlined by her instructors (there is no creative license here), but also, she has to consider the long and fantastical history of the marble itself, laid by the passing of a great ocean and its plants, then laying hidden for millennia until broken apart by Renaissance-era merchants. This is what is meant by the title Painting Time.

Painting Time is split into three parts: first, Paula's experiences at the decorative painting school, where she lives with Jonas and comes to know her friend Kate. The second outlines Paula's initial career as a set designer for the historic Italian movie studio Cinecitta, and the third a job she takes on reproducing the famous Lascaux cave paintings. The middle part, the movie studio part, layers new and interesting questions over the first section: what does it mean to reproduce the fantasy world of movies, rather than something real? But this section is meandering, I thought, especially with de Kerangal's winding sentences, that routinely go on so long that you lose track of the grammar of the sentence's beginning, and a little saggy. It's the final section that really brings the novel together. The famous Lascaux caves are no longer open to the public, but Paula's project is the last in a series of replicas that are even more popular than the original. And yet Paula must copy them without having seen them. She immerses herself in the World War II-era story of the caves' discovery, in a way trying to collapse many layers of time--prehistoric, historic, present--but the imagination required makes one wonder about the distinction between artistic genius and the workmanlike labor of craft.

Paula has heterochromia and strabismus: her eyes are two different colors, and pointed in slightly different directions. This condition is part of her unique appeal to some, including Jonas and Kate, and a romantic liaison with a man who is provocatively only called "the charlatan." In a novel about a painter-painter you might see it as a symbol of genius, a unique way of looking at the world. It might be that, here, too, and an illustration of Paula's split self, discarding more bourgeois dreams of "artistic" painting for this different path. But thinking of that title again, it seems to me an image of eyes that cross time, that point toward the present and the past, which fold, but perhaps not completely, into a single image. One eye on the real and one eye on the reproduction, but with a blurred line between that complicates one's notions of what is real and what is fake.