What would it feel like to be unable, on pain of death, to stay in one place for more than three days or return to the same location twice? Marrying inspirations from Verne and Borges with his own distinctive vision, Westerbeke’s engrossing debut offers one answer. It begins in 1885 Paris, when nine year old Aubry Tourvel is struck by excruciating pain and facial bleeding. Doctors can offer neither cure nor explanation, but Aubry and her family learn by trial and error that she risks death if she remains anywhere for more than a few days or attempts to return there again. Mrs. Tourvel spends three years on the road with her daughter until Aubry sneaks away one night, releasing her mother to return to the family home. Forced to remain constantly on the move, Aubry sharpens her natural resourcefulness, learning to hunt her own food and negotiate language barriers with help from a picture book she creates to communicate key needs. More painfully, she learns what love is like when it can only last three days and grows accustomed to leaving even the people, places and experiences she values most behind. Aubry’s unique affliction makes her an international celebrity, but one aspect of her travels is never revealed: the fact that sometimes, when faced by impassable deserts or mountains, she finds escape in the form of openings to a huge subterranean space. In what seems to be a vast underground library, she discovers scrolls of stories narrated in images and feels the limits of time as well as space break, then is able to emerge back into the world with geographical obstacles behind her. Eventually, she circumnavigates the earth five or more times. Fantastical as Aubry’s predicament surely is, the themes of Westerbeke’s novel speaks powerfully to familiar human concerns. Travelers moving through an unimaginably huge and complex world, unable to step in the same river twice, dealing with constant change and our sometimes unswayable hearts: we are Aubry Tourvel, and Aubry Tourvel is us.
