Praise
De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch.
— Publisher's Weekly, starred review
This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of 'a human jawbone from the mesolithic,' an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal’s mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators’ lives
— The New Yorker
The characters in Maylis de Kerangal’s haunting stories are impassioned detectives or solitary archaeologists taking the measure of those traces by which we find our way. In their immersive observation they track the minute changes that transform everything they thought they knew about the way we’re both jettisoned and anchored by those around us.
— Jim Shepard
The stories capture fleeting ideas and moments . . . Above all there’s an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future . . . An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance.
— Kirkus Reviews
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 . . . Voices, in particular, often serve as a kind of portal between the living and the dead, between memory and present-day life . . . Altogether, Canoes is an exquisite collection, my favorite of the year.
— May-lee Chai, Star Tribune
[De Kerangal's] ability to balance emotional restraint against an exceptional eye for detail, and a fondness for sweeping sentences and paragraphs that frequently go on for pages, allow her to tell stories that are at once spare and revealing . . . Even though some of these pieces have a very tight focus, the characters and narrative voices (all first person) are distinct, the settings varied, and in some instances I was left with this eerie feeling—a sense that I wanted to know where the characters went after the story closed.
— Joseph Schreiber Scofield, Rough Ghosts
This gorgeously vivid collection of braided stories follows women disoriented by sprawling suburbs and a new language, UFOs, sonic waves, grief and alienation.
— People Magazine
These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational . . . [Canoes] traffics in a kind of matter-of-fact, unsentimental wonder—the kind of work that makes you more alert, critical, and curious.
— Chloe Pfeiffer, BookBrowse
