There are many things to recommend Yiyun Li’s novel, The Book of Goose. For me, it started with the cover (published by 4th Estate in Australia) – what appears to be a section from an Old Masters painting, with a pop of neon. The contrast was arresting and I bought the book, knowing nothing about it or the author. Yep, raw-dogging my book-buying.

In brief, it’s the story of Agnès and her best friend, Fabienne. As children in a postwar provisional French town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves. Fabienne, the bolder of the two, hatches a plan to create some excitement in their lives, and the result changes everything for Agnès. 

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life – by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

The story is billed as one of ‘fortune and terrible loss’, explored through themes of ‘friendship, art, exploitation’. Technically, these claims are true, however they do imply something more dramatic than what Li has delivered.

Agnès, a girl filled with self-doubt and an eagerness to please, bends to the whims of her friend and to the adults in their lives. Her efforts to assert her own desires are weak, and despite the story being told from the perspective of Agnès as an adult, she never springs off the page like the daring Fabienne.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

Li’s sentences are like polished stones – I have no doubt that she laboured over each, and there many that saw me pause to ponder –

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

If you’ve sensed a ‘but’ in my review, you’d be correct. From the outset, I felt like I was reading a French version of My Brilliant Friend (and you might recall how I felt about the Neapolitan series). Both books examine intense female friendships marked by deep affection and a sense of manipulation. Both books also focus on how the friendship shapes the path each person takes. Once I’d seen the parallels, I found it impossible to read Goose without comparing. At least there won’t be another three installments to Agnès’s story.

At one point, Agnès reflects that ‘…revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer…’ – and that sums up my feelings about this story.

2.5/5

Agnès spends time in an English boarding school –

On Fridays, we were served fish pies, a delicacy to me, which the others only picked at, remembering escargots, consumed with their parents, in a Parisian café or in a hotel in Menton.