Astragal

19-year-old Anne - old enough to take her pants off, old enough to go to jail, legally still a child - jumps off the 10-metre wall of the jail where she's serving a 7-year sentence. Smashes her ankle, crawls to the highway, is picked up by a small-time crook with a motorcycle who helps her hide with various acquaintances as she recuperates as well as she can, having to depend on others. This is love. This is freedom. This is never being able to walk right again.

Astragal is many things. Largely autobiographical, to take the most obvious, tragic (and in a way least interesting) fact: Sarrazin - orphan, mixed-race, abuse victim - wrote the book, as well as the follow-up, in jail, and eventually married the guy on the motorcycle before dying at age 29. One of those books you should read before age 25 for the best effect, probably. A product of its time, for sure: "To live outside the law you must be honest", Week-End, all that jazz; a dream of "freedom" that's already starting to look frayed at the edges, asking the question "...of what? To what? For how long?" The astragal of the title is the ankle bone (specifically the one called "leap bone" in Swedish). The novel is named for the price she pays for freedom: the ability to run, to dance, to drive a car, to walk barefoot, leaving her free to be tied to the same world that saw her end up in jail in the first place. As she limps from hiding place to hiding place, falling in what love is there, trying to unpause, to become.

Of course, none of this would matter much if it wasn't also another thing: Really fucking well-written. Anne narrates the whole thing in a style that never seems like it's trying to be either literary or "street", just is, a jumble of detailed, unflinching but never too deliberate impressions and thoughts and memories that keep the story tumbling along in one long breathless monologue, even during the long stretches where little actually happens beyond bones stitching themselves back together. (No wonder a young Patti Smith loved it and gushes about it in the foreword.) It's not a nice story about how love or freedom or cameraderie fixes everything, or even anything. It's just a book that, somehow, keeps getting lighter even as the things it bears try to weigh it down.