Maylis De Kerangal explores memory, voice, and human connection in the story collection Canoes (Archipelago, Oct.).
Canoes are one of many motifs that appear in all of these stories. What inspired this decision?
Canoes can contain narrative. It’s a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” of fiction. I see the canoe as a basket going through each part of my imagination and memories, collecting the stories. And they were a means of communication for the First Nations in North America, who used them to go from village to village. It’s quite a magical object with a totemic poetic notion.
A character in “Nevermore” hires the narrator to read a poem and instructs her to “climb inside the text as you would through a half-open window.” Did you have this image in mind when writing these stories?
I wrote each story thinking about the others. They are all connected. For me, it’s a novel cut in different fragments rather than a collection. I call it a “novel in detached pieces.” And there are women’s voices in all these stories: the parts speak to each other.
Strong voices are central to Canoes. Tell us more about where these voices come from.
The voice of the text is an enigmatic thing, and it’s very important to me. When we’re reading, we hear a voice, and it’s not the author’s or our own. We hear another voice. Voices can tell of what we’ve endured, our failures, our past, even our social situation. Recording a voice is also capturing a life, a body. In “A Light Bird,” a daughter wants her father to erase the voice of her mother from their answering machine, because she’s been dead for five years. This story is about how the voice of a deceased person can still activate love between people. It’s a magical part of a human being that remains alive.
The collection ends with a narrator who interviews a UFO witness and reflects on “the complexity of the human testimony.” How does this idea relate to the fantastical elements that appear in the stories?
I was approaching a frontier I’d never explored before. Not magical realism, but something like that. My previous books were very involved with documentary and work processes. With Canoes, I tried to explore another world filled with magical elements, mystery, and enigmas. And I was writing in the first-person for the first time.
How did writing in the first person inform your approach to fiction?
Canoes is a constellation with a planet at the center: the longer story “Mustang,” inspired by the two years I lived in Colorado in the 1990s. There are elements full of spirit in the book, because that’s close to the way I see the American landscape—filled with rumors of the past and the voices of the elements. It’s like magical materiality. I tried to approach the contours of this frontier, and it was important to build a poetic material made of voices, presences, and ghosts.
