Welcome friend! I added Crossings by Alex Landragin to my TBR back in 2020 and it was great to finally read it as part of the Backlist bingo challenge!! A unique story about two people who transfer their soul to other bodies and survive centuries, Crossings offers an interesting take on existence. This review is going to be structured a bit differently. I will present my thoughts on sections of the synopsis.
Crossings is 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 coolest thing about this book which got my attention back then was that this book can be read multiple ways. There is the sequential, one page after the other order that we normally follow but there is also a Baroness sequence that starts the story at another spot. I read sequentially this time
Reading From Start to Finish – Review of Crossings
Story # 1
The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl.
I think it’s brilliant to write a story about multiple lifetimes and use a real person, a poet at that, as one of the people trying to understand his life. Charles Baudelaire was indeed a French poet. Though I do not know how much of this story was true to his real life, the tortured creative soul persona is used very well here.
Charles’ long time relationship with the woman he loved, Jean Duval, has ended but he still thinks about her. When he meets a woman who wears a veil and knows so much about him, he starts to wonder if the stories Jean told him were actually real. The veiled woman whose name is Édmonde de Bressy tells him about the act of crossing. How by looking into a human being’s eyes for a period of time, he can transfer his soul into their body and live another life. Charles is done with this life and Édmonde finds him a suitable candidate to cross into. She encourages him to write his memories for his successor to help his soul remember in the next body.
This story left me with questions: who is Charles really? How does Édmonde know so much about the crossing and Charles’ past life? Who else knows about the crossing?
Story # 2
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.
Walter Benjamin falls in love with a woman who convinces him to steal a manuscript for her. This story connected well to the prologue of the book with the bookbinder and the manuscript he had been given. It explained the foundations of the literary society that Édmonde de Bressy was also part of, connecting back to the first story as well.
Story # 3
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.
This last one is the true origin story that brings it all together. Alula and Koahu were born on an island in an indigenous community. Their culture had practiced crossings to preserve knowledge. When Europeans arrived, Koahu accidentally made a crossing and in an attempt to follow her lover, Alula did the same. What follows is the story of Alula trying to find Koahu in his many forms. She was trained in crossings and knew how to remember her past lives while Koahu was not and would only remember in nightmares what he had lived before.
While the last two stories focused on the people who knew about the crossing, this story answers the question: what about the other soul? It is also the story of living. Though Alula left to find Koahu and succeeded in finding him many times, she was also able to live years without him and enjoy life. She talks about the many reasons she crossed into people and how it went against her culture’s teachings but she could not help it. She ultimately returns to her people to find how they were affected by Koahu’s accidental crossing and her departure decades ago.
Conclusion
Crossings is an unforgettable adventure full of love, longing and empathy.
Crossings is a work of literary fiction that would be great for book clubs! Each story is distinct in style and kept me engaged. I liked how interconnected they all were and the insights I got about the first two stories in the final story. It let me ponder the power of crossing and see the variety of reasons a person practised it. I found the book thought provoking and am interested to see how my experience and understanding changes in the Baroness sequence.
Have you read Crossings? Or a book with such a concept? I would love some recommendations!
If are intrigued, add this to your Goodreads shelf.
Be First to Comment