Book Review: The Book of Goose

From The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li:

Amazon

  The questions that did not occur to me to ask at thirteen feel important now. I wonder if Fabienne knew the answers. I wish I could ask her. This is the inconvenience of her being dead. Half of this story is hers, but she is not here to tell me what I have missed."

Book Review: The Book of Goose. Memoir of Agnès, a girl author whose brief fame is not entirely earned. A coming-of-age tale of a girl and her best friend Fabienne, the one who seemingly has all the answers for Agnès, the one with only questions. But Agnès has heart. A-

After the jump, my full review.

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Grade: A-

Agnès and Fabienne are best friends, thirteen-year-old girls growing up in a rural French town in the early 1950s. The girls have vivid imaginations and make up stories that they live out. One of their stories gets written down and is judged to be worthy of publication as a book. Agnès becomes famous as the the book's sole author (which she knows isn't true) and is awarded a scholarship to attend a prestigious finishing school in England, where she is tasked with writing another novel. But Agnès cannot stand the separation from Fabienne. By this point, we are most of the way through the novel.

It's not the simple plot that earns this novel a grade of A-. It's what Agnès tells us of herself and her relationship to Fabienne. She describes herself as the one who asks too many questions. Fabienne is the one with all the answers. Fabienne is also at times teasing, mocking, or smug. Agnès isn't any of these things. Agnès describes the difference as, "I was not Fabienne. Her mind was like a bird. My mind was like a train, and someone had to lay the track down for me." Later, in hindsight, Agnès uses a different analogy: "All those years we had made ourselves believe that we were two apples hanging next to each other on the same branch, or that we were two oranges nestled in a crate, or, even, that we were born with joined selves, like one of those oddly shaped radishes or potatoes, two bodies in one. But that was only our make-believe. The truth was, Fabienne and I were two separate beings. I was a whetstone to Fabienne’s blade." The novel is punctuated with insights like this and philosophical asides that demonstrate that Agnès has depths that she didn't know or appreciate growing up.

Best friends. Two unique persons. They were always better together than either was alone. But life gets in the way. Agnès believes that of the two, Fabienne was the real author, but the story Agnès tells is richer than anything we learn about Fabienne's true feelings. Agnès sums up the impact Fabienne had on her: "How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?" It would be fitting if Yiyun Li wrote a second novel, one from Fabienne's point of view. I would buy that, too.

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"The Book of Goose" would make a fine selection for "Richardson Reads One Book".