And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep / Jocelyne Saucier
trans. from the French by Rhonda Mullins
TO: Coach House Books, 2021.
208 p.

This is another translation from a Quebec author that I kind of liked but also found dragged on a bit. It's an interesting concept: Gladys, at the end of her life, hops a train to leave her village of Swastika and her troubled daughter Lisana, returning to the constant train travel of her childhood -- her father was a travelling schoolteacher across Northern Quebec and her family lived on the train. 

The narrator of this book is a man who is tracking down family and friends of Gladys, as well as anyone who might have seen her on a train, to figure out what happened and why. We learn a lot about Gladys' youth, her life in the weirdly named village and her long-term care of her problematic daughter. We also catch glimpses of why she might have just picked up and left with no notice; there are shades of what she might have been looking for as she searched for a last chance at freedom. 

I found a lot of this interesting; Gladys herself, her past, the idea of train travel as a kind of metaphor for freedom. But I also found the story dragged, like a long train trip that you eventually get tired of and just want to end already. The narrator character wasn't compelling to me, and it was like that conceit just added another layer  of distance between the reader and Gladys' motivations and experiences. It was a lot of telling, and at times the story moves away from Gladys to other elements, which felt tacked on to me, as well. 

So overall, despite the potential I was a bit bored by this book. I wanted to finish it to see if we figured out what had motivated Gladys and how her life ended, but did skim through the last third just to find that out. I might try another book by this author in future though, to see if it catches me a bit more.