In Last Night in Montreal, Emily St. John-Mandel creates an addicting narrative that focuses on Lilia’s journey to overcome her past. Throughout the novel, readers follow Lilia’s past and present, and come to understand how it has impacted her future.
From my perspective of being the actual audience, I found this book difficult to come to terms with. Between the abuse Lilia suffered at the hands of her mother as a child, her being kidnapped by her father at a young age, and her inability to stay in one place as an adult out of her fear of being found, this book was a lot to digest. Being that I have lead a comparably stable life in one place, I had to do some work to be able to play the role of the authorial audience.
This quote on page 65 of the novel helped me to begin to see the occurrences in the text from a different point of view:
“What I want,” she said quietly, on the third night he spent with her, “is to stop traveling and stay in the same place for awhile. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.”
pg. 65
After reading this quote, Lilia and her storyline became much easier to relate to, since the desire for things we haven’t experienced is universal among humans. While some people who have stayed in the same place all their lives have a desire to travel the world, the opposite can be said for Lilia, who has never had a stable home. As someone who wants to travel one day, I was able to relate this experience of wanting what I’ve never known to Lilia’s desire to stay in one place for a while. By finding the similarities between these two desires, it helped me to step in the role of the authorial audience.
In terms of the narrative audience, one must identify who Lilia was speaking to when having flashbacks of her childhood. After understanding that she is recounting the events that made her who she was, it seemed to me that the “you” she was telling the story to was Eli. At the beginning of the novel, we find out that Lilia shared her childhood traumas with Eli, so that insight made me recognize that when she was having flashbacks of her past, it was actually taking place in present time as she shared her history with Eli. This allowed me to identify her boyfriend, Eli, as the narrative audience and the “you” that she addresses throughout the novel.
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I also had a difficultly connecting with the novel when I began reading it, since it really is a lot to take in. However, personally, what allowed me to become part of the authorial audience was when we as readers found out that the real reason Lilia went to Montreal was not because the wanted to leave Eli, but because she wished to find out more about the past she didn’t remember or understand. Finding this out humanized Lilia to me in a way, since I no longer viewed her as someone who was willing to hurt the people she loved for senseless, selfish reasons, but rather, as someone who was seeking peace and closure to her story in order to move forward. I feel that this would be an interesting book to reread, since at the end we do find out that Lilia was able to find closure to that chapter of her life, settle down, and get married. I feel that having this knowledge at the beginning of the novel would change the way we read the book, which would be an interesting experience to explore, in my opinion.
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