The Book of Goose

Li Yiyun’s “The Book of Goose” is a story of childhood friendship between narrator Agnès, a one-time prodigy from rural France credited with publishing a book at the age of 14, and Fabienne, who pushed Agnès along the path to fame.

Towards the opening of the novel, Agnès, now living with her husband Earl in Pennsylvania — where she raises geese — receives word that Fabienne has died in childbirth. As she reflects on this news, Agnès unwinds the events that led to her literary stardom in a long flashback that comprises most of the rest of the novel.

Her story begins in the farming village of Saint Rémy during and following World War II. Growing up, all that really matters to Agnès is to remain close to Fabienne and to live out the games and fantasies her friend creates for them. But when Fabienne thinks of the idea for the two of them to write a book with the help of the widowed postmaster, M. Devaux, and pass off Agnès as the sole author, her scheme winds up driving them apart.

Having published the book, a collection of stories titled “Les Enfants Heureux” that depicts children dying in horrible ways, Agnès becomes a quick success and something of a curiosity for people who wonder how a young girl from a provincial town turned the morbid details of her everyday life into words worthy of wonder. With this new existence comes an array of adults seeking to harness her potential to generate money and publicity. Mrs. Townsend, a woman who runs a girls’ finishing school in England, convinces Agnès’s parents to allow her to provide their daughter with free education for a year, during which she will act as her legal guardian.

Agnès is reluctant to go, but Fabienne flips this situation into a new game for them to play: While at the school, Agnès writes to her friend and also to a made-up boyfriend of Fabienne’s creation, Jacques, whom the girls pretend is Fabienne’s brother.

Fabienne and Agnès themselves seek to disrupt the dull narratives their lives are pitched towards — marriage, children, death — although the grim truth that fame and adventures come with their own dull narratives soon sets in. Still, they try their best to live by their own rules.

“The Book of Goose” draws on conventional elements. This is a tale of childhood friends whose closeness threatens patriarchal and heteronormative structures, of those two friends growing apart, of a character making a journey from a simple country setting to one of urban refinement, of that character becoming acquainted with the cynical realities of celebrity.