Cw: suicide, depression, death

This author/translator duo is a must-buy for me, but it still took me a while to get to this book! I was not disappointed, however. Saucier’s books just always dig so deep into the spirit and the heart with a cast of characters and a style that totally absorbs me.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep is a written recollection of a train buff and English teacher who follows the mysterious journey of an old woman, Gladys, who leaves her chronically suicidal daughter at home in the sleepy town of Swastika and begins a journey, ending in her death, that leaves everybody in her wake baffled and confused. We meet tourists, old friends, conductors, and complete strangers who crossed paths with her and, in a few cases, get swept up in her wake. Interspersed amongst these recollections were memories of Gladys’ time in school trains in northern Ontario, train history, and the author’s own thoughts on the whole thing.

The book covers so many topics: As we jumped from one train to the next, the clickety-clack of the tracks following the narrator as far away as France, we explore so many topics: aging and death, self-determination, freedom, community, neighbourhood, mental health, and family. All bundled into one story that isn’t quite a mystery, but not quite a drama either. As a written recollection, it is framed as something not finished -- there are asides by the writer, breaks through the fourth wall to fictitious readers, and a half-parsed structure, as if we picked up part way through the narrator’s editing style. But as Saucier’s book, it is wonderful and reads so well. The incomplete nature of the style, and the rather unfinished ending, made as a reader that I was in the story too, and all I could do was jump on the train and go for a ride.