A book about obsession and identity.
An unusual story but definitely not one in the same vein as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. There is indeed a shared premise between the two books and that is two girls growing up in post-war Europe, with one of them possessing extraordinary intellectual abilities, although deprived from non basic educational opportunities, that form a strong bond and friendship while battling a harsh and often unforgiving reality around them. However, I think this is too superficial a comparison and somewhat unfair to both writers to be considered as a selling point for the story in "The Book of Goose".
To start with, Ferrante's narrative is firmly grounded on reality with a superb sense os time and place, with characters, even minor ones, reflecting the socioeconomic structure of post-war Italy.
The Book of Goose finds the two girls growing up in rural France and one of them spending time in a boarding school in England in the fifties but it could have been set up anywhere in the world where circumstances that support the storyline could be applied. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I think that Yiyun Li is interested in the dynamics of the relationship between the two girls more than anything else. So, the book reads as a very "esoteric" account of the lives of Fabienne, the more powerful and charismatic of the duo, and Agnes, the more earthbound, literally and metaphorically, one. There are many references to them being two parts of the same entity pulling each other together and apart and a surreal take on how this relationship evolves. An interesting book, and I do not regret reading it, but I struggled with the curious and fable like storytelling, which completely ignores the wider world around the two main characters, as well as the deliberate(?) imbalance between them, especially as Agnes who, in her late twenties is the narrator of the story, assumes an incomprehensible dummy/passive role more often than not.