Book review of The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

Friendships made in childhood have an depth like no others, as they’re usually rooted in fast and typically inexplicable emotions of connection. This variety of deep relationship is the topic of Yiyun Li’s novel The Book of Goose. Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and typically damaging friendships that may happen between two ladies.

Fabienne and Agnes grew up collectively within the countryside of postwar France. Memories of these days are reignited when Agnes, now married and residing within the United States, hears from her mom that Fabienne has died in childbirth. 

As ladies, they performed collectively endlessly, with the dominant Fabienne all the time taking cost. When Fabienne means that they write a e-book collectively, Agnes complies, however it’s not a real collaboration: Fabienne dictates the story to the extra docile Agnes, who additionally has the higher penmanship. Their e-book is a set of frankly advised tales concerning the harshness of nation life, and it attracts the eye of the village postmaster. Interest spreads so far as Paris, the place the e-book is printed solely beneath Agnes’ identify, and the younger writer turns into a minor celeb. Agnes is then despatched to ending faculty in London, the place she falls beneath the tutelage of the controlling Mrs. Townsend.

Now, years later, Fabienne’s demise provides Agnes the chance to return to phrases with the life she created for herself, so far-off from Fabienne’s calculations and Mrs. Townsend’s grandiose expectations.

Told by Agnes in short, succinct chapters, The Book of Goose is a sublime and disturbing novel about exploitation and acquiescence, notoriety and obscurity, and whether or not you select your life or are chosen by it. Through her characters, Li research the sway of manipulation, just like the power-shifting recreation of rock-paper-scissors—a motif which steadily pops up all through the novel. And although Agnes by no means stops eager for the buddy whose brilliance supplied her life with a way of wholeness, the reader is perhaps excused for believing that it was Agnes’ recreation to win all alongside.