Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Date Read: March 11th 2018
Published: January 1st 2009 @ Vintage
Genre: Literary Fiction/Mystery
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
“By now there were over a hundred pages of documents relating to the case: photographs, police reports, possible sightings. Memory reduced to manila envelopes and typed documents, stills from surveillance videos, early childhood photographs.”
After more than a year in awe of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, I've finally taken to her backlist, starting with Last Night in Montreal. Mandel's debut novel, published in 2009, opens to a view of Eli, failed scholar of linguistics, and his enigmatic girlfriend, Lilia. When Lilia leaves the apartment for the morning paper and never returns, we descend into the mystery of Lilia's upbringing, having spent her life on the run from a private investigator after she was abducted by her father as a child. Grieving over his abandonment, Eli follows Lilia from New York City to the cold and disconnected Montreal, where he meets Michaela.
While it's obviously been refined in her later work, Mandel has always had a gift with words. Her metaphors are poignant, and she obviously crafts each character with such care and attention. The Italian title for this novel is "la musica delle parole," which translates to "the music of words," and that is what the writing in this book achieves. And it's so perfect given the importance of words and language to this story.
When Eli, who is working on a thesis about dying languages at the novel's opening, is still deciding whether or not to go to Montreal, he has a conversation with a friend about going to a city where the language truly is dying. It's emphasized on several occasions the power of language and how it can both serve to bring people together and to isolate them. Each character's relationship to language mirrors their relationship to the world: Eli is fascinated by language, and the beauty of having specific words that are unfathomable in other tongues, but he can only speak English, showing the disconnect between theory and practice in his life. It also shows in some ways how he sees Lilia, who is in many ways an unfathomable study to him as well. Michaela lives in a city with an almost militaristic dedication to a language she doesn't speak, which serves to underline her loneliness and isolation. Finally, Lilia, who speaks at least four languages and works at translating things from one language into another with little to no favouritism, is a citizen of no place and therefore of no language, constantly in a state of transience.
Between interludes of Eli and Michaela grappling with what it means to be left behind, we see glimpses of Lilia doing the leaving all throughout her life. While this story is in some ways a mystery, it's also more an unraveling. The big reveal at the novel's end doesn't feel like a shock so much as an expected eventuality, as do many other secrets throughout the story. That being said, this did make the story's end lose a bit of traction, and there were some loose ends that I found incredibly frustrating.
It does also have to be said that Lilia is, for her faults, the archetypical manic pixie dream girl: she's odd and charming, everyone in her life seems to fall half in love with her. I think throughout the story, Mandel is able to unpack this trope in a lot of thought-provoking ways, but it is an archetype that the author seems to fall back on again and again.
This was overall a beautiful and evocative story about memory and loneliness and transience that investigates its themes in interesting and methodical ways. Written in Mandel's gorgeous prose, though it did misstep sometimes, it was really wonderful.
While it's obviously been refined in her later work, Mandel has always had a gift with words. Her metaphors are poignant, and she obviously crafts each character with such care and attention. The Italian title for this novel is "la musica delle parole," which translates to "the music of words," and that is what the writing in this book achieves. And it's so perfect given the importance of words and language to this story.
When Eli, who is working on a thesis about dying languages at the novel's opening, is still deciding whether or not to go to Montreal, he has a conversation with a friend about going to a city where the language truly is dying. It's emphasized on several occasions the power of language and how it can both serve to bring people together and to isolate them. Each character's relationship to language mirrors their relationship to the world: Eli is fascinated by language, and the beauty of having specific words that are unfathomable in other tongues, but he can only speak English, showing the disconnect between theory and practice in his life. It also shows in some ways how he sees Lilia, who is in many ways an unfathomable study to him as well. Michaela lives in a city with an almost militaristic dedication to a language she doesn't speak, which serves to underline her loneliness and isolation. Finally, Lilia, who speaks at least four languages and works at translating things from one language into another with little to no favouritism, is a citizen of no place and therefore of no language, constantly in a state of transience.
Between interludes of Eli and Michaela grappling with what it means to be left behind, we see glimpses of Lilia doing the leaving all throughout her life. While this story is in some ways a mystery, it's also more an unraveling. The big reveal at the novel's end doesn't feel like a shock so much as an expected eventuality, as do many other secrets throughout the story. That being said, this did make the story's end lose a bit of traction, and there were some loose ends that I found incredibly frustrating.
It does also have to be said that Lilia is, for her faults, the archetypical manic pixie dream girl: she's odd and charming, everyone in her life seems to fall half in love with her. I think throughout the story, Mandel is able to unpack this trope in a lot of thought-provoking ways, but it is an archetype that the author seems to fall back on again and again.
This was overall a beautiful and evocative story about memory and loneliness and transience that investigates its themes in interesting and methodical ways. Written in Mandel's gorgeous prose, though it did misstep sometimes, it was really wonderful.
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