Malma Station: A Novel

“Schulman exposes the dangers of clinging too hard to stories that don’t serve us, while illustrating both the transcendence and freedom found in discovering the truth.”

Told through three braided narratives, Alex Schulman’s Malma Station is both a family drama and an engaging thriller. More than anything, however, it’s an exploration of time and memory.

Each of the three main characters are traveling to Malma Station at different moments in time. First, we have young Harriet, traveling with her photographer father who she knows didn’t want to take her in the divorce because she is “tricky,” and they “don’t quite jibe.” Harriet knows her mother didn’t want her either, both of her parents vying for Amelia, Harriet’s older sister. This sense of abandonment will haunt her throughout the novel.

Memories are sources of sadness for Harriet. From the train, she watches two birds in a field and “imagines they’re remembering something from their childhood, and it just makes her sad.”

Next, we have Oskar, a man traveling with his wife—the adult Harriet. They are clearly at odds with one another, and we see Harriet’s grown self only through the eyes of her husband. From the first night they met, Oskar thinks, “He should have stayed away from her, there was so much that was broken.”

Yet he’s mesmerized by her, as well, this sad, wise woman who says things like, “Only once will you catch sight of yourself, and that moment alone will be either the happiest or bitterest moment of your life.” She says this early in the novel, and it threads it way through each piece of the narrative, building energy with the movement of the story. Will the characters ever be able to see themselves? And if they do, what will they find?

Lastly, there’s Yana, the daughter of Oskar and Harriet. We receive glimpses of her as a child through Oskar’s sections, but her sections find her an adult, both of her parents gone. She knows her mother never returned from the journey to Malma Station that she took with her father. Yana also knows her mother took a trip there with her own father when she was a girl, so Yana embarks again, “tracing the events of the two previous trips, looking for the shape of a story that spans decades.”

That shape changes and rearranges itself throughout the novel. Pieces become clear only to be obscured by the next chapter. This gives both the narrative and the characters a feeling of fragmentation—none of these people are whole.

And their memories don’t align. Oskar claims that Harriet is the one altering the record: “They would experience something together and later on she would recast it in her mind, the incident now so twisted and warped he could no longer recognize it.” Yet Yana describes her father as “tense and closed off, and even if he didn’t say a word the whole family was governed by his mood.” His reliability is tenuous at best. Young Harriet’s perspective comes with both a sense of honesty and misunderstanding. We see the world from a child’s viewpoint, complete with child-logic, which sometimes fails to miss the full meaning of a moment. As an adult, Yana seems the most reliable, but her timeline is full of holes (largely due to her father’s omissions), so she relies on speculation.

It's a somewhat chaotic swirl of information that can feel disorienting at times, but ultimately, the desire to piece the puzzle together overrides the confusion. There’s also the desire to reconcile the past with the future—to trace the child Harriet was to the mother she becomes. Though we know certain plot points, we don’t know why and how the characters arrived in those places, and those mysteries propel the story forward.

There is no changing the past for these characters (though the jacket copy claims otherwise), but there is the potential to rewrite false memories, and that is the book’s greatest message. These characters don’t have to be defined by the narratives of brokenness assigned to them by others, nor do they have to keep their family members in particular roles either. If they take in everything around them and let themselves see the full scope of their place in the world, they may just see themselves for who they really are.

Ultimately, Schulman exposes the dangers of clinging too hard to stories that don’t serve us, while illustrating both the transcendence and freedom found in discovering the truth.