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��[H]e’s no beggar, no victim, he’s just like her, he’s running away, that’s all.��

There’s something about trains that makes them a perfect catalyst for a thriller. Lumbering across the landscape like a plotline, there is a flattening of social class in these confined spaces carrying strangers from one place to another. Each person is a mystery to the others and the simple act of traveling makes us wonder where are they going or, perhaps, what are they running from? Spanning 9,289 kilometers, the Trans-Siberian Railway is the world’s largest rail system and an ideal setting for a literary thriller which French author Maylis de Kerangal brings to life in her tense novella Eastbound. Twenty year old Aliocha, having been unable to swindle or seduce his way out of Russian military service, is desperate to desert and finds unlikely aid in Hélène, a French woman with her own reasons for running away from Siberia. Across beautiful landscapes the odd pair are stressed and tested by language barriers and the threat of detection, as Kerangal’s gorgeous prose piles words upon words with a frenetic energy building tension to a fever pitch. Eastbound will have you holding your breath and frantically flipping pages as this miniature drama of a hunted deserted plays out against the immensity of the ��raw, wild, empty�� natural world.

The Trans-Siberian Railway passing Lake Baikal.��

For a short novel, Eastbound is an absolute feast of tone and tension. We find our characters moving with trepidation through ��deserted corridors like gaping holes that snatch at them��, passed the threatening gazes of young conscripts spilling across the train in drunkenness and debauchery, and all is overseen by the big and beastly Sergeant Letchov, ��sly as a threat,�� always cursing out violence and vitriol or threatening murder into his cellphone at his mistress. It transforms the hallowed history of the railway into an ominous and grimy space of confinement that feels even more restrictive juxtaposed with the vastness of the beautiful landscapes passing outside, the ��woolly mauve wilderness,�� the ��chasm and the sanctuary.�� Its all swathed in tension that feels like it might tear your sanity apart at any moment ��as though the real was tearing apart under the pressure of a faint but immutable deviation, something far bigger, far stronger than it.�� I adore the way her prose stacks up with long, winding sentences like the words are a line of train cars being pulled around the contours of the novel.

�� She’s helping me, yes, but she doesn’t trust me.��

Aliosha wants off this train. Unable to avoid conscription, his usually meek manners make him a target for the hazing and violence rumored to happen in the barracks and he has no desire for military life. After he is beaten by other conscripts, he is determined to flee. His tepid relationship with Hélène, a foreigner riding in a sleeper cabin further up the train, forms through a wordless connection neither quite understand, completely unromantic yet bound by an ineffable mutual understanding they are both people wanting to flee. Even she can only guess at her own motivations, and often regrets them while still determined to help.

�� this sordid scenario where she gave herself the lucky draw, proclaimed herself the hero, the stranger who descends from the sky, saves you and then slips away, ready to rack up self-convincing statements �� I did my utmost, I did all that I could �� all the while knowing she’s incapable of believing it: the worm of guilt is already lodging itself in her gut.��

While the action is more centered around Aliocha, it is Hélène who draws the most interesting existential probings of the novel. She who has just fled from a Russian lover she describes as ��magnificent�� and has been deeply in love with but sometimes wonders if the attractions was because he was ��from the forbidden country.�� When he is sent to work in Siberia, he finds himself reunited with his heritage and enamored by it while she feels ��out of place, out of her own climate, her language, blind and deaf she would say over and over, laughing, and alone.�� The reasons for her departure are a mystery even she is trying to fully understand, making for a perfect scenario for this partnership of desertion.

Trans-Siberian Railway Route, with our characters heading to Vladivostok

Language is key to Eastbound, and the layer of translation—brilliantly executed by Jessica Moore—seems to actually enhance the experience. The text is seasons with Russian or French words left untranslated that emphasize the language barrier between Aliocha and Hélène, and there are frequent passages that unpack the elements of culture inside language. There is a marvelous moment where her Russian lover leaves a voicemail and his descriptions of the textures of language bring to mind the textures of the landscape:

��You must be near Irkutsk by this time and, strangely, I like knowing you are that city--the "a" dark and deep, nearly a closed "0," the warm vibration of the "r��, rolled in the base of his throat; my love, soon you will see Baikal, make sure you leave the door of the compartment open, you can see the lake from the corridor for a full half hour, make sure you don't miss it, it's a treasure for the Russians, the country's pearl, but for me, for us, the men of Siberia, it's simply the sea--the labials that linger, the dentals that collide, the light hiss of saliva under the upper lip--yes, I said "us, the men of Siberia," I'm rediscovering my country, Hélène, and I am happy����

Brilliantly, Kerangal makes identity, language and landscape all seem to mold into one, something that is always an undercurrent in this tale of desertion and the ways characters are fleeing situations incongruent with their identities.

As much as Eastbound is a thriller—the gripping conclusion had me at the edge of my seat as the story teeters on the precipice of chaos and disaster—it is also a deeply introspective novella and a loving examination of the natural world within which all our epics in miniature unfold. Maylis de Kerangal is an exquisite writer that excels at tone while also training her prose upon the story like a documentarist chronicling the events. Eastbound is a short, faced paced thrill ride across Russia and I will most certainly embark on other journeys through Maylis de Kerangal’s literary landscapes again.

4.5/5

�� the dawn raising up the forest at full tilt, lifting each trunk to vertical, the bluish underbrush perforated by rays charged with a carnal light, the taiga like a magnetic cloth, modulated to infinity by the new thickness of the air.��