The Book of Goose

This was a very frustrating read for me, because I wanted so badly to love it and just couldn't. It's a book with many qualities that I'm drawn to: clever prose, intense adolescent female friendship, an English boarding school. But as a reader who loves characters, I found the central pair of friends (teenagers Agnes and Fabienne, living in rural poverty in France after World War 2) challenging to connect with in different ways. Agnes, the narrator, is a void where a personality should be. She's mostly defined in opposition to Fabienne, but in ways that feel very surface level: Fabienne is active, Agnes is passive. Fabienne is willful, Agnes subsumes her will to Fabienne's. Fabienne is impetuous, Agnes is reserved. You may think that Fabienne is the more interesting character and you would be right, but we only see her through Agnes's eyes and Agnes seems to find her inscrutable, or at least inarticulable. The writing almost feels like it undercuts any emotional power the novel threatens to demonstrate, often refusing to let story beats breathe before making a droll comment on them. It just never came together to draw me in.

“You cannot cut an apple with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. You can, if you have a knife, cut an apple or an orange. Or slice open the underbelly of a fish. Or, if your hands are steady enough and the blade is sharp enough, sever an umbilical cord.”

Two young girls, Agnès and Fabienne. An intense friendship.

“You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book's depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.”

Fabienne is the mastermind. Agnès follows her lead.

“You can hand the knife to another person, betting with yourself how deep a wound he or she is willing to inflict. You can be the inflicter of the wound.”

Fabienne concocts a scheme to write a book. The book is about all the awful things that happen in their provincial village in France. Fabienne convinces Agnès to claim to be the sole author of the book.

“One half orange plus another half orange do not make a full orange again. And that is where my story begins. An orange that did not think itself good enough for a knife, and an orange that never dreamed of turning itself into a knife. Cut and be cut, neither interested me back then.”

Two young girls, Agnès and Fabienne. An intense friendship...

Cautionary note: This is not a thriller. Don't go into reading this novel expecting a story where characters are clearly defined. It is not a novel where a plot develops and things happen and other things happen as a result of those things.

Instead, this novel feels like a story that the characters told to the author, a story the author in which the author had no input, but a story with characters that feel very true, a story that feels very true.

I will say that when I closed the book, I felt disappointed. I wanted things to happen; things did not happen. I wanted big revelations; there are no big revelations. But as time went on after I finished the book, I liked the book more and more. I am still thinking about the book a day later. I will probably keep thinking about this book. By the end of the year, I may think it's one of the best books I read in 2023.

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li is a novel of literary fiction about two teenage girls from the post-World War II French countryside who write a book together, making one of them famous. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li. Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised–the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves–until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.”

Agnès and Fabienne are young teens stuck in a rural French village post-WWII. Fabienne is rebellious and often cruel. Agnès is passive and malleable. They concoct a plan to write a book of gruesome stories about village life and enlist a widowed postal worker to unwittingly help them get it published. He succeeds in helping them meet with his colleagues in the publishing world in Paris. Agnès is convinced by Fabienne to be the sole “author” of their book which launches her into literary infamy. Later, Fabienne conjures a plan to ostracize the widower from the village by pretending to be sexually assaulted. An English private school headmistress then takes Agnès to England for an all-expenses paid year of finishing school, but the headmistress has her own selfish motives for helping her. All the while, Agnès just wishes to go back to the small village in France and be with her strange and unruly friend, wishing the two of them would move to Paris together and start their own life.

Li has uncanny insight into the lives of these girls, portraying them both as creative, vindictive, cunning, and imaginative. Fabienne is unrelentingly cruel to animals, first petting dogs in the village then kicking them just to see their surprise. But her gravity is too strong for Agnès to get away from; she's mesmerized by her rebellious friend. Agnès is quiet and meek to the point of being so mysterious that everyone puts their own motivations upon her. But even Agnès eventually shows her fangs, not only to headmistress Mrs. Townsend in England, but through her narration and insight looking back at her childhood. Ultimately, she gets the final word on this miniscule slice of history being that she's the narrator for The Book of Goose.

Li is a confident writer. Elegant philosophical musings flow beautifully from her prose. For example: “Sometimes you hear people say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life. A day in a cloister can be as dramatic and fatal as a day on a battlefield.” So true.

I really enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this book 5 stars.