Canoes

Praise

“This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of ‘a human jawbone from the mesolithic,’ an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal’s mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators’ lives.”
— The New Yorker

The characters in Maylis de Kerangal’s haunting stories are impassioned detectives or solitary archaeologists taking the measure of those traces by which we find our way. In their immersive observation they track the minute changes that transform everything they thought they knew about the way we’re both jettisoned and anchored by those around us. — Jim Shepard

“Maylis de Kerangal’s [Canoes] collects small, poignant worlds. Spun in long, stream-of-consciousness sentences, her text snakes like a stream. The stories’ common thread is voices—changed, unrecognized, lost . . . Jessica Moore’s translation is seamless and poetic.”
—Theodore Anderson, Newcity

“De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch.” –– Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The stories capture fleeting ideas and moments . . . Above all there’s an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future . . . An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance.”
–– Kirkus Reviews

“Exquisite . . . De Kerangal pairs gloriously sensuous and caustically incisive visual descriptions of interiors, cities, highways, sprawling suburbs, land, and sky with uncanny and revealing soundscapes that capture the layered timbres of nature, humans, and machines. These unusual and vibrant stories are poetically recalibrating, droll, and intriguing.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist starred review

“These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational . . . [Canoes] traffics in a kind of matter-of-fact, unsentimental wonder—the kind of work that makes you more alert, critical, and curious.”
— Chloe Pfeiffer, BookBrowse