I liked Station Eleven, so I grabbed a couple other Emily St. John Mandel books from the library. Last Night in Montreal — the author’s debut — is, like, pretty good, but not good-good — you know what I mean? I liked it, but the author’s sort of drifty, dreamy narrative style doesn’t work as well here as it did in Station Eleven. And while I desperately wanted to know how it ended and solve the central mystery, I didn’t really enjoy the journey getting there.
“It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping as imminent.”
So Lilia Albert’s father kidnapped her as a child, under mysterious circumstances that you will figure out very quickly on your own, then have confirmed in the last few chapters. They travel the country for years, constantly avoiding the police, and an obsessed private detective who abandons his own daughter in favor of searching for Lilia. When Lilia’s father decides to settle down at least, she continues to travel, repeating the pattern of abandoning a city after a few days or weeks or months, into her early 20s. When she disappears yet again, this time from New York City, her boyfriend Eli decides he has to find out what happened to her.
The good: Eli’s thesis, which he’s been working on for years, focuses on dead and/or dying languages. Lilia, who never attended school after the kidnapping but got quite an education from her very intelligent father, speaks 5 live languages. Their conversations, and Eli’s musings, about languages fascinated me. Truthfully, I probably would have enjoyed reading his thesis more than I did reading this book. I also liked the stories of Lilia and her father — what they saw in their travels, how she made her little claim on each place they stayed.
The bad: the characters in this book tend to be really, really unlikable. One wants to shake Eli by the shoulders and tell him to forget this broken girl who obviously wants nothing to do with him. The obsessed detective and his broken daughter depressed the hell out of me. And Lilia herself, even with all the glimpses we get into her past, remains mostly a mystery. Also, the ending really disappointed me — like I said, I figured it out really early but thought there must be something more to explain the whole situation. Spoiler alert: there’s really not.
