Last Night in Montreal

No one stays forever. On the morning of her disappearance Lilia woke early and lay still for a moment in the bed.  It was the last day of October. She slept Naked. (pg. 1)

But he played that morning back so many times that the tape was ruined…Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of laying awake and considering things, the quality erodes. (pg 2)

With a few deft strokes we are introduced to Lilia and Eli.  Lilia doesn’t know how to stay in one place having traveled most of her life, saying “I’m not arriving anywhere; I’m only leaving somewhere else.” (pg. 72)  We find out a very young Lilia walked out of her mother’s house one snowy evening into her father’s arms and they have been traveling ever since moving every few days.  As an adult, she ends up in New York and begins a relationship with Eli who works a meaningless job in an art gallery and struggles to complete his graduate thesis on dead and dying languages.  After a few months, Lilia leaves and Eli is devastated. He later receives a mysterious clue about her whereabouts and he follows her to Montreal.

Besides Lilia and Eli, the novel is populated by few characters: Christopher, the detective hired to find Lilia, Christopher’s daughter, and Lilia’s father.  Lilia’s mother and brother also appear briefly but they play a major part in the events that take place.  Much of the novel is Lilia remembering her time on the road, Eli trying to find Lila, and Christopher’s growing obsession with the case.  In the end we learn a great deal about the “whys” of these characters.

The language of the novel is incredible and Mandel creates layers upon layers in a way that adds a great deal of depth without losing the simplicity of the story.  There are many references to the myth of Icarus which becomes an important image in the novel.  Vanishing is also an important concept – beyond Lilia’s constant vanishing, Eli studies languages that are dying:

He had become obsessed with the untranslatable…every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French deja-vu: perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all…If you accept this, he told her, this premise that every language holds something that exists in no other tongue, an entity for outweighing the sum of its words, then the loss takes on a staggering weight. (pg. 17)

What happens when something of such magnitude is lost? When the last person is gone, who will serve witness? Questions like these permeate Mandel’s work leaving the reader contemplating the nature of memory, personal worth, and the connections we have with ourselves and each other.  Yet the novel is remarkably easy to read.  At one point I thought Mandel was being repetitive and circular in her narration but by the time you get to the end, the structure makes sense with the meat of the story; the circular nature of the narration reflects the meandering journey of Lilia and her father.  Mandel’s writing is wonderful and I had a hard time choosing passages to highlight.  I would highly recommend this novel.

Last night when I was bebopping around the Internet I came across a site called Largehearted Boy which is mostly a music blog which also covers books and pop culture.  He has a feature where he interviews authors about their work and asks them what music they listened to while writing or for a mixtape relating to their work.

His interview with Emily St. John Mandel may be found here and, like her work, it was very interesting.

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