Ten Wafer-Thin Books Set on Trains

Something about traveling by train offers a perennial formula for good fiction. Strangers meet on trains, are forced into awkward, artificial relationships. People may be running to something or away from something else. The time spent on a train is sort of a hiatus from everyday life. No surprise, then, that so many novelists have been attracted to setting a story on a train (Eastbound) or using a train journey to trigger a relationship (In the Train) or sending characters off in an unexpected direction based on an encounter on a train (The Train). Here are ten wafer-thin books set on trains.

• Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Penguin Classics, 150p.)
  This Japanese noir mystery is both the least- and most-train-related book in this batch. Mostly, it’s about a police detective trying to solve the mystery of two dead bodies — a man and a woman — found on a beach near the town of Fukuoka. But the solution hinges entirely on train schedules and their clock-like reliability in 1950s Japan. You can finish it in the space of a bullet train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto.

• The Train by Georges Simenon, translated by Robert Baldick (Penguin et al., 144p.)
  Marcel and his pregnant wife and daughter are fleeing the German invasion of France in May 1940. He becomes separated from them in the confusion of the mass flight and climbs aboard a freight train headed west. He then meets Anna, a beautiful blonde woman who might be Flemish or Dutch or … German? A vivid account of the chaos of the fall of France that draws heavily on Simenon’s own experiences. When the book was first published in English in 1964, Brigid Brophy wrote, “The Train is probably the book everyone has been expecting from Simenon. If we aren’t satisfied now, we are ingrates…. This is nothing, of course, to do with the absolute size. The Train has the usual Simenon brevity; he simply gives more condensed value than the standard package.”

• Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Edith Pargeter (Grove Press et al., 91p.)
  Closely Watched Trains (also published as Closely Observed Trains and A Close Watch on the Trains) is the book that first brought Bohumil Hrabal to the attention of readers in the West, helped along by Jirí Menzel’s sublime film version, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1967. Set in a sleepy Czech railway station during World War Two, it’s about Miloš, a novice dispatcher in love with the pretty conductress Máša and the good and bad lessons taught by the randy stationmaster Hubicka. It’s charming and lighthearted and for most of the book the war seems far away … until suddenly it doesn’t.

• Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll, translated by Leila Vennewitz (Northwestern University Press, Penguin, 110p.)
  Böll’s first novel follows Andreas, a Wehrmacht private aboard a troop train bound for the Eastern Front, a destination he believes means certain death. During the journey, he gets to know two other soldiers as well as a Polish woman involved with the resistance. Despite his fears, he finds it possible to notice and enjoy moments — eating, drinking, humor — that distract him and cause him to wonder about the relationship between life and death.

• The Manila Rope by Veijo Meri, translated by John McGahern and Annikki Laaksi (Alfred A. Knopf, 137p.)
  This Finnish novel recounts the opposite journey from that in Böll’s novel. A private rides a slow train crowded with fellow soldiers on their way home for mustering out. Just before he leaves, he finds a German manila rope that seems too valuable not to take with him. He wraps it around himself, leading to great discomfort and misadventures along the way. Meri suggests that peacetime life is going to be just as irrational and chaotic as anything the soldiers have experienced in the war.

• Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (Archipelago, 127p.)
  In this French novel, a young Russian conscript, on his way to a base in Siberia and aware of the brutality of the Putin-era army, enlists the help of a French woman traveling on the same Trans-Siberian train. She is leaving her lover, having realized she can never assimilate into his world; the soldier just wants to desert and escape his fate. Some reviewers suggest the two fall in love, but I think it’s more accurate to say they fall into mutual sympathy. A story perfected matched to its wafer-thin length.

• In the Train by Christian Oster, translated by Adriana Hunter (Object Press, 148p.)
  Imagine a romance as seen by the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s classic, The Mezzanine. Two people meet on the platform at Gare St. Lazare. A debate about his carrying her bag goes to tedious and comic lengths, just a foretaste of what’s to come — and what will either make this wonderfully funny … or endlessly irritating. Here, for example, is their initial parting after an hour of sitting side by side in almost total silence:

  I said well, okay then, see you. I wanted to make a clean break, given that, either way, she was going, and I was glad I was the first to say it. On the strength of that, she said it back to me, see you, so I’d just secured an answer, a sort of contract even, because answering see you isn’t like being the first to say it, not at all, it’s an endorsement, in fact it’s as if, when someone answers see you, it takes on more meaning coming from them, emphasizes the desire to see the other person which lies dormant every time the words are said, because you’re actually repeating those words. And, because you’re repeating them, it’s as if you were countersigning them, hence the idea of a contract. And I found it touching and even encouraging, this exchange.

  I must say, though, that it’s tough to keep this sort of thing going and I felt the comic tension slackened as the book nears its end.

• Night Train by Friederike Mayröcker, translated by Beth Bjorklund (Ariadne Press, 126p.)
  Riding the night train from Paris to Vienna, a woman recalls her relationship with her abusive father and reflects on her unhappy marriage. Mayröcker’s first novel translated into English, it exemplifies what Ryan Ruby has called her elegaic approach: “she has constructed a vast work of mourning, a mausoleum of text, a heaven of the book, where, one after another, she places the loved ones she has survived for safekeeping, leaving, as always, space enough for herself to join them when the time comes.” A dense and difficult book that translator Bjorklund compares to Joyce’s Ulysses in its complexity. However, it should be noted that Mayröcker’s text only accounts for 80 pages, the rest being taken up by Bjorklund’s afterword.

• Night Train to Nykøbing by Kristjana Gunnars (Red Deer Press, 128p.)
  A Danish woman, an academic who has been living in Canada for years, has left the lover she plans to return to Denmark for and is traveling to her aunt’s home in Nykøbing in the south. She thinks of the life she has shaped for herself in Canada and about the risks and opportunities of surrendering all that to a new relationship. Richly informed with references to Clarice Lispector, Annie Dillard, and others (there is a reading list at the back), this is a literate and fascinating story.

• The Yellow Arrow by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield (New Directions, 92p.)
  Although The Yellow Arrow is set on an express train between St. Petersburg and Moscow, it could well just be a metaphor for life itself, particularly since everyone on the train knows it’s headed for a bridge that’s ruined and can’t support it. Passengers trade in metals extracting from the train’s doors, attend an avant-garde theater productions, toss their dead out the windows. Written in the style of stolid socialist realism, yet mad as a hatter, full of the sense of the breakdown of the Soviet world:

  There was a long deserted platform — Andrei spotted an old set of false teeth lying in solitary isolation on the flat concrete. Close by was a pole bearing an empty steel rectangle, which had once held a board with the name of the station. A wall made of several concrete slabs flashed by, with a tall heap of rusty iron lattices towering up behind it, then everything was hidden once again behind a dense living all of trees…