The Book of Goose

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.