Crossings (Landragin)

Crossings:  A Novel
Alex Landragin, 2020
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250259042


Summary
An unforgettable and explosive genre-bending debut—a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.

On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be read one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence.

—The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl.

—Next is a noir romance about an exiled man, modeled on Walter Benjamin, whose recurring nightmares are cured when he falls in love with a storyteller who draws him into a dangerous intrigue of rare manuscripts, police corruption, and literary societies.

—Finally, there are the fantastical memoirs of a woman-turned-monarch whose singular life has spanned seven generations.

With each new chapter, the stunning connections between these seemingly disparate people grow clearer and more extraordinary. Crossings is an unforgettable adventure full of love, longing and empathy. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
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.

Landragin 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 MA in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne and occasionally performs early jazz piano under the moniker Tenderloin Stomp. Crossings is his debut novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The novel’s formal gambits and transgressive literary figures lend a bit of highbrow window dressing to an otherwise anodyne romance. Imagine a slightly elevated Dan Brown thriller, or a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, and you’re mostly there. Netflix would do well to option it immediately.
New York Times Book Review


A high-concept speculative adventure novel executed with intelligence and grace.… [A]n invigorating puzzle of a book that reads like a complete, intricate work of genre-defying fiction.
Vulture


[An] ambitious, sparkling debut.… While tacking back and forth through the three narratives is going to require more effort than some readers will be willing to give,… Landragin’s seductive literary romp shines as a celebration of the act of storytelling.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review) [O]utstanding for its sheer inventiveness. The alternative ordering of chapters creates a tension that heightens the awareness of the interlocking aspects of time and space, while deft writing seduces the reader. Highly recommended. —Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Library Journal


[A] remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives.… Each story is rich with characters, ideas and keenly imagined moments…. There’s a tension between wanting to read quickly… or slowing down to allow each story to breathe.
BookPage


(Starred Review) [A]n impressive debut novel.…  Landragin carries off the whole handsomely written enterprise with panache. This novel intrigues and delights with an assured orchestration of historical research and imaginative flights.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Right from the opening line, appropriation is a major theme in Crossings. How does the novel explore this theme? And to what end?

2. The conceit of the crossing allows the reader to inhabit the bodies of characters of a variety of cultures, sexualities, genders, classes, and races. What does the novel have to say about identity?

3. Discuss how Crossings challenges the reader’s ability to distinguish the real from the fake, and why this might be important.

4. Crossings traverses 150 years and seven lifetimes in under four hundred pages. Discuss how language, form, and genre are used to drive the narrative forward across this timeframe.

5. "I am Alula. I am the one who remembers. You are Koahu. You are the one who forgets. "Memory and forgetting are major themes. Discuss how past and present relate in the  novel. Crossings is preoccupied with history. What kind of history is the book interested in, and why?

6. Alula believes Koahu forgets his previous lives when he crosses, except in his dreams. And yet if he cannot remember his previous selves, what claim does he have to being the person she says he is? How does the novel suggest identity might be possible without memory?

7. If Alula decides on the spur of the moment to cross with Joubert as a desperate act of love, what does she learn about love as a result of her decision?

8. What role do morality and ethics play in Crossings? Is there a moral to the novel?

9. What is the nature of the relationship between Balthazar and Artopoulos? And is Artopoulos’s final judgment of Balthazar—"You are evil!"—justified?

10. The narrator of "City of Ghosts" claims to fall in love with Madeleine even though he disbelieves everything she believes. Is it truly possible to fall in love with someone whose belief system is so different to one’s own that one questions their capacity to reason?

11. Crossings is, in fact, two books, with two beginnings, middles, and ends. They’re quite different from each other, but they consist of exactly the same words. What is the effect of this structure? Which is the better book? Could a third sequence be envisaged?

12. Crossings may be a fantasy concept, but what corollaries does it have in our real lives? What religion or other belief system does crossing most resemble?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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