Like many people, I don’t have the time or inclination to scour the entire marketplace for fiction and non-fiction books, so I rely on recommendations from a variety of sources. One such trusted source is the Booker Prize, both the original and the one for translations. I had just received four books from the longlist of the International Booker Prize 2025. Yet, I was still stuck with one book from the shortlist of last year’s original Booker Prize, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. Admittedly, I wasn’t very happy with that list. I started with Anne Michael’s Held but could not make enough sense of it to write a brief description. Perhaps, I will give it another try later. I moved on to Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, which turned out to be as low-key as her previous novel, The Weekend. I moved on to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which is a fine book, though some praise was more directed to its focus on our planet earth than its literary qualities. Then, I enjoyed Yael Van Der Wouden’s The Safekeep. Next on my list was Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. Her book took me a long time to finish, with several interruptions in which I pondered whether it was worth spending more time on reading it. The actual theme sounded promising enough: An American female undercover agent with an invented identity is tasked to infiltrate a French rural commune of people with an alternative worldview and an inclination to disrupt state projects by staging protests. Since a big state-sponsored project is underway concerning the creation of huge water basins that would have a serious impact on the local farmers, her job is to find out whether the members of this commune are planning any disruptive actions, whether it is an “insurrectionary group.” “The core of my assignment and duties had been to infiltrate and to monitor Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards for proof they had committed sabotage and were planning more of it” (p. 71). A hundred pages later, the narrating protagonist reiterates, “It was my job to find evidence that the Moulinards were a threat. Whether they were a serious threat was irrelevant. Either I would locate evidence, or I would locate a way to implicate them, so that police could raid this backwater and shut down their little commune” (p. 173). This may sound as if this book is a crime novel. It is not. Far from it. Rather, the novel leisurely flows along like a small river in rural France. Readers are treated to reading many hacked emails written by a former left-wing revolutionary who now lives in a cave, muses about the Neanderthals and cave paintings, and sends his missives to the group that “Sadie” is set to infiltrate, which she does on the pretext of translating writings of this group from French into English. It takes the author 139 pages for “Sadie’s” first meeting with the leader of the group, Pascal Balmy. Sixty pages later, on p. 197, she finally arrives on her field site and is shown around by Pascal. A further one hundred pages later, on p. 291, she reports to her “contacts” (who remain faceless but provide her with almost all the information that she needs for doing her job) that the group planned to disrupt an agricultural fair that would take place in two weeks’ time. “From there, things accelerated.” But even this “accelerated” process needs one hundred more pages, until Kushner lets the climax of the book happen like a scene from a slapstick comedy (p. 390). Slapstick or not, “Sadie” is very well paid for her job, buys herself a nice E-Class Mercedes, and drives it into retirement in a nice Spanish seaside resort.

MHN

Nonthaburi, Thailand

3 March 2025