The Spine of a Novel That Tends to the Eternal

���Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.���  --Cesare Pavese

The above is one of my favorite quotes as it seems to suggest to me not only the physical journey but the deeper emotional well of any good narrative of self-discovery. It's the foundation or backbone on which so many wonderful novels I have read over the years seem to rest. I am drawn to them because such a structure is how I tend to think when constructing the shape of a story or novel; our separation from the familiar, our trust in strangers, the off-balance, the journeying, the transformations and the leaning into all things eternal.

Here is a short list of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the last ten years that in many ways embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:

 

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Mexican author Yuri Herrera is an amazing and haunting work. A young woman Makina is given a note from her mother to take to the older brother who has disappeared into the North. Along the way, Makina encounters a series of ambiguous helpers: the thug who mysteriously owes her mother, the trading of favors with a coyote, the strangers who pull her along the road, the rivers, and mountain passes, and then the cities themselves, full of mazes, flags, and shops until -- almost miraculously, she arrives at a place to discover her brother, changed utterly. Read more > > 

Hillary St. John Mandel's remarkable Station Eleven  is an apocalyptic (and post apocalyptic) novel that despite its contemporary setting and clean, modern prose, reads like the middle passage of a good fairy tale, with its dangerous but transformative journey through the dark woods. The story is book-ended at the beginning by the moment the world was changed when a virus wipes out most of humanity, and then, just before the end, when we return to the opening events of the narrative, the death of an actor from a heart attack hours before the virus descends. Read more >>

Pedro Paramo by Mexican author Juan Rulfo' opens with a spare compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August Juan travels to Comala, a town so hot and dry, popular myth has it that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro P��ramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells his mother is dead, Eduviges merely shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak." Read more > >>

 Thaliad by Marly Youmans offers a healing balm to the swath of nihilistic post-apocalyptic fiction. Told in free verse reminiscent of heroic epics (Homer meets Gerald Manley Hopkins), Thaliad recounts the aftermath of a fiery apocalypse and the perilous journey of a band of children led by a girl whose prophetic visions are guiding them, hopefully to a sanctuary on the edge of a lake where they must confront the challenges of re-creating the world illuminated by hope and love. In this stunning narrative the eternal is always close at hand in violent and transfigurative  powers.  Read more >>

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht is an astonishing novel, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Tavelling is a hazard as boundaries shift with the conflicts and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state. Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and his death alone in a remote village. Read more > >