Crossings (2019)
By Alex Landragin
St. Martins Press, 384 pages
★★★★
Crossings, the debut novel from Alex Landragin, has a
bit of everything: pure fiction, literary fiction, science fiction, romance,
mystery, anthropological observations, and paranormal activity. It spans 150
years of time, but implies things ancient and inexplicable.
The novel opens
with a clever device. It’s opening lines are, “I didn’t write this book. I
stole it.” Baroness Beatie Ellingham visits a respected Belgian bookbinder and
advises she will send a book by courier with instructions and materials on
recovering the text. She makes him promise that he will not read it. All bets
are off, though, when the bookbinder discovers several days later that the
baroness is dead, the victim of a grisly murder in which her eyes were cut out.
As the bookbinder peruses the volume, he observes that the baroness has made
notes on how to re-sequence the chapters. And so, it is left to each reader to
decide whether to read it straight through as originally written, or as Baroness
Ellingham re-arranged it.
The first path will
take you through three interconnected novelettes: “The Education of a Monster,”
reportedly an unknown ghost story from French poet and essayist Charles
Baudelaire (1821-67); “City of Ghosts,” a noir romance whose central character
is clearly German philosopher/theorist/critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940); and
the third, “Tales of the Albatross,” which involves Polynesian rituals and a
(literally) timeless love story. The baroness’ path is more circuitous, but it
weaves the three separate stories into a single strand.
Any way you read
it–and most will choose one and sample the second–you will wend your way
through an amazing, often perplexing tale in which Baudelaire and Benjamin
factor prominently. If you take you cues from the baroness, the narrative opens
with a chapter titled “This is Where the Story Ends.” A man (Benjamin) encounters
a mysterious woman in Paris’ Montparnasse Cemetery standing aside a tomb in
which four past presidents of the Charles Baudelaire Society are buried. The
year is 1940, Nazi troops are just outside of the city, and Benjamin, a Jew,
knows he needs to flee. Yet he lingers as he yet he is drawn to the woman, and
over several dangerous days, falls in love with her. It is truly a fatal attraction,
though not how you might imagine.
The baroness’
sequence is, however, neither how the story ends or begins. A true beginning
requires gleaning from the novel’s most difficult-to-grasp sections from “Tales
of the Albatross.” These take place on a Polynesian island named Oáeetee, which
we visit first in 1771. There we learn of several unusual rituals, including a
tattoo practice restricted to inscribing the body only with inked eyes. More
unusual still is the rite of “crossing,” which gives us the novel’s title. Initiates
(and sometimes a novice) stare into each other’s eyes and by doing so, exchange
bodies. It is such a powerful and potentially dangerous practice that the
island’s chief mandate (merely called the Law) is “there be no crossing without
a return crossing.” “Blind crossings,” those in which the second party is unaware
of the exchange are considered especially dangerous. In 1791, however, a French
ship enters the harbor and circumstance drives two lovers, Koahu (male) and
Alula (female) to violate the Law. This will set in motion a pursuit across time
and the globe in which Koahu will assume six bodies and Alula seven. Baudelaire
is somehow in the middle of all of this.
Crossings will put you in mind of David Mitchell novels.
This means that it is nearly impossible to describe what happens in a linear
fashion. Crossings also involves gender transformations that evoke Virginia
Wolff’s Orlando, as well as racial crossing. From here you can start
adding elements: a mad bookseller, mesmerism, colonialism, slavery, gold teeth,
violence, evocations of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and the
appearance of French designer Coco Chanel. She, Baudelaire, Benjamin, and
Jeanne Duval, a former slave who was Baudelaire’s muse and lover, are historical
figures who interact with colorful imagined characters.
Is Crossings
a vampire tale? Not really. A paranormal fantasy? Maybe. An overdressed romance?
Possibly. I don’t mean to be coy. Like a David Mitchell novel, reading Crossings
is more experiential than sequential–another reason why it can be read several
different ways. It is also one whose internal logic is peculiar to the worlds
Alex Landrigan interconnects. Your imagination is the only key that can unlock
any of it.
Crossings is also a book one hopes is never adapted
for a film. At best, a movie would impose coherence to a book whose magic lies
in controlled incoherence. At worst, as was done with Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,
a movie would make a complete hash of the novel. Crossings may frustrate
you at times–I suggest you keep a list of characters and their avatars–but I
heartily recommend that you read it. You are unlikely to come across too many
other books this delightfully weird and unique.
Rob Weir
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