Last Night in Montreal [Paperback]

At its heart this story unfolds as a type of strange and desperate road trip. A homage to love and to loss, the novel begins as the young Lilia aches to disappear from her life in Brooklyn and her boyfriend Eli. Eli is truly flummoxed at Lilia when she walks out on him, taking her purse, as she always did and her suitcase gone from under the bed. All that remains of her is a photograph from her childhood, taken on her twelfth birthday. As dense and as multi-layered as the memories that constantly shroud Lilia's fractured childhood, Eli's existence is suddenly broken neatly into two parts. A researcher of dead languages, of particular interest small languages on the edge of distinction, Elis is flattered by the fact that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, her formidable intelligence coming as a bright and exuberant shock.

Lilia's who had been disappearing for so long she didn't know how to stay and has been haunted by childhood memories of traveling through the American south west with her father, running from a childhood of all false names and lost memories, she maintained a secretive passionate life of study, a girl without precedent, and a mind like a switch blade. To Eli she didn't seem to be quite human: "a pale, clean-shaven creature, half mermaid, half girl" who hides an enigmatic past involving her father, Peter who stole her away from the family home one night when she was eight.

Lilia had unmoored Eli, her departure making him want to disappear, but when he receives a postcard from Montreal with no return address, and the message: "She's here, Come to Club Electrolyte. Come soon, Michaela" he knows that he must travel to the wintry city to find her. Suddenly Eli's task becomes more has become more complicated. Landing in Montreal he meets the enigmatic Michaela who emanates a certain quality of darkness, clear and vivid, "a kind of negative light." A strange and mercurial girl, and an exotic dancer who relies on pills and has no permanent address, only Michaela has read all the notes on Lilia's case from her father, Christopher. But Michaela refuses to tell Eli where she is, even as she's only one who truly knows her friend's story, and is her only witness.

Mandel navigates her characters through the tricky terrain of memory, where Lilia's past life collides with characters from her present, Michaela, Eli, and Christopher, the private detective who is obsessed with finding her. The shimmering heat of Arizona is contrasted with the blistering cold of night-time Montreal. The author's feverish landscape is awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars reflected in phantom water, the edges blunted in brilliant light. The constant need to escape drives Lilia, convinced that only wondering fulfill her needs even as she's blind to the events that shaped her existence and the night that Peter abducted her from the family home in a fit of desperation. She constantly battles the strangeness of her upbringing, the missing parts of her family, and the events that may or may not have transpired before he took her away. While Eli embarks on a futile search to fins his love, this is an unusual and exotic tale that converges on the icy streets of Montreal. Meanwhile, Mandel's characters constantly over the surface of life, fast and choreographed, reflecting the shadows and light that make up the riptides of life. Mike Leonard June 09.