Book Review: “A Short Walk Through a Wide World” by Douglas Westerbeke
Running a Marathon
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: It is the year 1885 and you are a nine-year-old girl living in Paris, France. One day, you start bleeding from the eyes, the nose, the lips, and the ears. You walk a little way away and the bleeding stops. However, if you return to the site where this sickness took hold, you will begin to bleed all over again. The only way to stay well is to keep moving. If you stop in one place for more than three days, you will start dying again. If you return to a place where you had been before, you, too, will start bleeding all over again. Thus, the only cure for this mysterious ailment is to keep walking and keep moving. A life lived like this means a life without much in the way of constant companions, but you do get to see the world. Would you like to live a life like this? You can if you escape into the pages of Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World. It’s the story of Aubry Tourvel’s life on the run and the people she (briefly) meets on the way.
This novel is about two things, I suppose: what it’s like to be a woman and what it’s like to be immersed in a life of solitude and reading. When it comes to the “being a woman” angle, Tourvel’s bleeding is reminiscent of menstruation — though a much more rapid cycle of that. In a sense then, the book is about the turmoil that a woman must go through, though I suppose this position falls apart when it comes to motherhood in a way because Tourvel doesn’t stay long enough with one person to have a chance of settling down. (Though I must admit, motherhood eventually does play a role in the plot at the very end of this work.) To wit, the book is being marketed as a female Indiana Jones-type story, a tale where a woman gets to have an adventure, though at a personal cost. When it comes to reading, A Short Walk Through a Wide World sometimes has Tourvel encounter libraries inside the earth that act as shortcuts across inhospitable deserts and immense oceans. It’s here where the novel takes on even more of a fabulist bent and suffers for it by relegating Tourvel’s illness to the realms of fantasy or science fiction. (I know, I know. The illness itself is pretty fantastic, but the book is unsure of its literary ambitions.)
Still, one can easily get carried away and lost in this work. For one thing, if you’re tired of one aspect of the story, you can keep reading because something is bound to change in a few pages as Tourvel must move on and go to another part of her unexplored earth. For another, this is a bit of a swashbuckler on land as Tourvel learns to survive in the wilderness, including the jungles of Africa and South America and the wilds of northern Canada. However, the novel does falter when it tries to explain away the fact that Tourvel is running into numerous other languages (which the book messily tries to get around the fact by making Tourvel a little too inclined to pick up new languages quickly, even though they may be way different than French — such as the case when she’s visiting the Far East). And the underground libraries aspect of the book is a weak spot. Though Tourvel learns to tell her own story in these places, it seems redundant as she has newspaper reporters following her — which is another blight in that just about everyone she meets is aware of her, even in the pre-Internet times of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Did everyone read the newspaper and follow the news closely back then?
Still, A Short Walk Thorough a Wide World is a captivating read. It’s entertaining enough, even during its boring bits, and you have to admire the author’s sense of adventurousness. (Incidentally, the author works in one of the U.S.’s largest libraries and sits on a panel of a prestigious writing award, the International Dublin Literary Award.) There’s a lot of love about this captivating read, and it’s enjoyable trying to figure out the puzzle pieces of what Westerbeke is trying to say with this work. While the book does paint itself into a bit of a corner by its end, and Westerbeke has to introduce more and more fantastic elements to the work for it to not paint itself into a corner, if you turn your brain off for a bit, this is an enjoyable ride. I’m not the only one who has felt this way. The book has been out for a couple of weeks now but is already something of a bestseller in America. Thus, it looks like A Short Walk Through a Wide World marks the promising debut of a writer we’re probably going to hear more of in the years to come. While it is not quite a superlative work, it is intriguing and sometimes fascinating and Westerbeke knows how to tell a gripping adventure yarn for the most part. Just be aware that there’s a fair amount of bloodletting, and it may or may not be referential to something else entirely. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, so be sure to dig in and enjoy the escapism that’s on offer here. It’s pretty good, if not entirely great, and is worth wasting the few hours it will take to plow through this.
Douglas Westerbeke’s A Short Walk Through a Wide World was published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster on April 2, 2024.
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