Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal, Archipelago Books

A novella with two main characters: a young Russian man—boy, actually—who’s on a train bound east, to fight in a war; and an older French woman who’s on the same train, having abandoned her Russian lover somewhere in Mongolia. The two meet in a corridor of the train. He’s going AWOL and hides in her first-class sleeping car. Not knowing each other’s language, they communicate by gesture and facial expression. At turns frustrated, angry, and grateful, they accommodate each other, as she hides him from the other soldiers, the presiding commander, and two cleaning ladies, one of whom is sympathetic to the young man, and the other who is on the side of the commander. Ably translated from the French by Jessica Moore, the text reads like a long poem with startling imagery and a rapid pace. The prose verges on the hallucinatory. The rhythm is propulsive, like the movement of the train itself, hurtling into the East and the future. Night and day, forests and villages are seen from train windows in rapid succession as the woman and young man remember scenes from their past and imagine their futures.