‘Canoes’ may be the best collection of short stories this year

Maylis de Kerangal’s new story collection, “Canoes,” is a moving, surprising exploration of grief and friendship across seven short stories and one novella, set in France, Canada and the United States.

Beautifully translated from the French by Jessica Moore, the stories plunge the reader into the sensory experiences of varied protagonists, who include translators, students and even a UFO investigator. What they share is an affinity for the sounds of the world around them.

Canoes appear as a motif in the stories, from a pendant swinging from a dentist’s necklace to an Indigenous craft hanging over the entrance of an apartment complex to a singing student’s voice, catalogued as “light canoe on dark ocean.” It’s a fitting symbol for de Kerangal’s characters, who are in search of a vessel to navigate the complications of their lives and the stream of memories that threaten at times to overwhelm them.

Voices, in particular, often serve as a kind of portal between the living and the dead, between memory and present-day life.

In “Ontario,” a translator taking a boat trip on the titular lake is overcome by memories of her late father, who loved to fish, a man whose voice she recalls as “high-pitched and mineral.”

In “A Light Bird,” a daughter urges her father, a grieving widower, to erase the voice of her late mother from his answering machine after five years. “Don’t you see it makes you look crazy?” the daughter insists. But the man sees his wife’s recorded voice as a more powerful talisman. “I imagined that Rose’s voice had decamped at the very last moment from the body that sheltered it. … Her voice survived her, in recorded form, indestructible.”

In the powerful central novella, “Mustang,” the shifts in a husband’s voice disconcert a woman grieving the baby she lost in a miscarriage. They have moved temporarily, with their young son, from Paris to suburban Colorado, where her husband is studying on a fellowship. He hopes the new environment will help her to overcome her depression.

Instead, the woman feels even more isolated, especially after she discovers her husband’s voice has changed: “The same way a bird changes color to camouflage itself in the branches and fool predators, Sam’s voice flows into those of the Midwest.” When she points out the changes, he responds in frustration: “Everyone changes here, you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

Much lauded in France and internationally, de Kerangal has been awarded the Prix Médicis. Her 2012 novel, “Eastbound,” was translated into English last year and was one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 best books of 2023.

In all the stories, epiphany comes when the protagonists least expect it, and often with sly humor. The unnamed Frenchwoman in “Mustang” begins to find harmony in her life through interactions with her gun-toting American driving instructor, Martina. As they recite instructions together on a highway (slow down, turn, overtake, change lanes, stop), the Frenchwoman feels a new sort of communion and warmth, noting, “I had the vague impression that we were singing together.”

Altogether, “Canoes” is an exquisite collection, my favorite of the year.

May-lee Chai, author of “Useful Phrases for Immigrants” and “Tomorrow in Shanghai,” is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

Canoes

By: Maylis de Kerangal.

Publisher: Archipelago, 197 pages, $18.