Author: Yiyun Li
Genre: Historical
First published September 20, 2022
Narrator (from AnyPlay): Caroline Hewlitt
Playtime: 9h 2m
Publisher: MacMillan Audio
Book Description (from GoodReads): 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.
A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
Review:
It starts off in the first chapters slow but soon you get caught in a very intense obsessive friendship- bordering on possession that makes you want to just get through the whole thing in a single sitting without putting it down.
One of the quotes that express it so well:
“Fabienne and I were meant for each other. We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience”.
Agnes received the news of her childhood friend Fabiennes has passed away. That sends her into a spiral and she starts to relive the period of her life when they were inseparable friends. Agnes and Fabienne grew up in the same small French town, but their home life was very different, it made no difference. The bond between these two teenage girls feels so intense - they're fiercely attached, inseparable and it proves to be the key to what the rest of their lives will be.
As part of a game, the girls start to make a book. Fabienne is the storyteller while Agnes is their designed scribe and she is the one to put it on the paper. The stories themselves are dark and yet so touching especially as the girls meant it as a representation of the life of other women and children in their everyday life.
Some of the Horrific tales were about:
An American Negro was executed….
A young woman suffocated her newborn and left it in a pig trough so the body could not be found.
A madman had sex with a cow. (Where did they get the inspiration, makes me shudder)
Another madman cut off the head of a chicken to show children how a headless chicken would dance. (This is very gory but something I see as normal, while growing up my family did the same thing. It seems to provide some weird amusement to the adults to see how kids react to this macabre show).
Fabienne and Agnes shared these stories with an older man in their village: a recently widowed postmaster named M. Devaux (a poet and author himself). Initially, the man is very grumpy and feels the young girls are nothing but a menace and will be an inconvenience but his loneliness ends up convincing him to allow them to continue to share their stories with him. They continue to work on their stories and he helps them edit them to make them presentable and he embarks on a journey to share the stories with the public (he ends up regretting this I'm sure). Devaux helped the girls get published. Fabienne decided that Agnes should take full credit for the book and she becomes famous. That's when her life starts to deviate away from her best friend Fabienne. The childhood and adolescence of the two girls in post-war rural France is done very well.
But the switch to an English school and the separation of Agnes and Fabienne dialed down the intensity but the obsession becomes even more apparent when Agnes returns to their home town her best friend seems to have a weird reaction. Particularly when showing the tomb of the imaginary boyfriend Ages pretended to write to while in English school. It's also hard when a key character is already dead before the book starts and so we never meet them directly, just see them via another person's memories and story. We never get any insight into Fabienne's feelings or thoughts we always get only what Agnes thinks about her with no backup to her attitude.
I don't want to really spoil anything else from the plot. Their complex and obsessional relationship intensifies as the two girls are unable to save or destroy each other. Their attempt to live in their own world, but after a while reality wins over their fantasy world.
The Book of Goose is the retelling of Agnes as an adult, it's born from her belief that a story must be written out or how else we get our revenge in real life.
For the writing there's nothing flowery or too showy about the style, it's quiet and a bit remorseless in a positive way. I'm glad I've read this for a variation on the theme of obsessive friendship and power, with an overlay of class and social expectations. I could read this again and maybe this time I will get a bit more as I know where this is going.
This book was picked for the challenges:
Read around the world: China.
Historical Fiction
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