Alex Landragin is a French Armenian Australian writer. Currently based in Melbourne, Australia, he has also resided in Paris, Marseille, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Charlottesville. He has previously worked as a librarian, an indigenous community worker, and an author of Lonely Planet travel guides in Australia, Europe, and Africa. Alex holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Melbourne and occasionally performs early jazz piano under the moniker Tenderloin Stomp. Crossings is his debut novel.
Soon after a Parisian bookbinder is tasked with binding a manuscript called Crossings for a reputed bibliophile, he learns his client has been murdered. He believes the crime is connected to the manuscript, so, disregarding his client's wishes, he reads it. What he discovers is a dazzling story consisting of three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. The first is a ghost story penned by notorious nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl. The second is a noir romance set in Paris on the eve of Nazi occupation, purporting to be the work of exiled German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. The third is the fantastical memoir of a woman claiming to inhabit many bodies across multiple lifetimes as she searches for her lost love. As the connections between this cast of unforgettable characters deepen, their stories merge into an extraordinary tale of separated lovers held captive by an ancient law, finding and losing love again and again.
Just before I start reviewing, want to put it out there that I read the Baroness sequence!
Crossings is a genre-bending, twisting novel. You twist through time and space and bodies to learn the stories of Walter Benjamin, fleeing from the Nazi takeover of France; Charles Baudelaire, who writes an account of the last few months of his life for an illiterate girl; and of a woman who has defied death numerous times to search for her lost love. The Baroness sequence depends on the reader contributing to a balancing act, as each of these stories is fed to the reader a little bit at a time until they can get a handle on how the stories intertwine. That being said, I felt like I was in complete control the whole time of what was happening. While of course there were moments of confusion, it was more like, I wonder how this all fits together rather than I am so lost. It made for a really enjoyable, choose-your-own-adventure type of experience, and made the novel feel like a puzzle that I had the power to solve.
Landragin's writing is also just beautiful. Each of the three manuscripts has its own distinct feel, and each character's motivations were clearly written into the text even if they weren't plainly stated. I loved jumping through each character's story through the Baroness sequence, and getting a handle on how they all intersected with one another. Even though a lot of reading this book depends on the type of experience you have with it, Landragin's entire novel is imbued with the questions of morality and mortality. I often disagreed with Alula's choices, to the point where I wasn't even sure if I trusted her motivations. The beautiful writing combined with these existential questions that unfold around the reader make for a quality read, in the sense that it's both imaginative while also remaining thought provoking and making a statement about its chosen themes.
The ending is something that I'm still grappling with. I guessed, near the end, how it would go. But even guessing the ending of the Baroness sequence didn't give me any sense of closure. By the end, most of my questions were about the characters introduced in the preface, and how they place into the narrative. Who are they in relation to the wide cast we just finished up with? I scoured the Internet for some answers, and at the end of the day, all I can say with confidence is this: this is the type of book that is meant to leave us guessing by the end. I think the power of this book is its imaginative structure, and the ease through which the author seems to pull it off. In that sense, the novel is meant to haunt us, and meant to keep us thinking about those themes of morality and mortality. I have hardly read a book that will keep me thinking about it like this one, which is why I know it deserves all five of those stars.
I hope Alex Landragin continues to write, and in the meantime, I'm going to keep my eyes out for more stories like this. Despite my anxiety over the ending, the joy was truly in the reading experience, and I would love the chance to replicate that with other novels out there.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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