In the biblical Book of Esther, days of feasting and rejoicing follow the deaths of 75,000 Persians who plotted against Queen Esther and her king. Author David Bergen, on Michael Elves’ podcast Turning Pages, revealed that he chose Days of Feasting and Rejoicing as the title of his latest novel because he wanted to explore the “odd perspective … of eating and rejoicing and feasting after you’ve slaughtered” your enemies.
This literary thriller is Bergen’s twelfth novel and fourteenth published work of fiction. On Elves’ podcast, he explains he wrote Days of Feasting and Rejoicing in 2010, but it was only a couple of years ago that a publisher would accept it. Given that Bergen’s past work has been deemed notable by the New York Times and has won and been listed for numerous Canadian and international awards, this previous rejection speaks perhaps to the former bounds of Canadian literature rather than to the quality of the book. Indeed, Bergen’s latest is a refreshingly different and exciting addition to the CanLit canon. And, as its title suggests, it is a truly sensual foray into the food, culture, and pastoral setting of Thailand, where most of the book takes place.
The novel’s opening sentence, “They flew from Bangkok to Bali, arriving in the late afternoon,” sets its tone, alerting the reader to the distance our antiheroine, Esther Maile, will maintain with us, as well as her cold, clinical nature. Esther has flown to Bali with her friend and landlady, Christine Case. Near the end of their trip (and within the first twenty-five pages of the book), Christine drowns in the ocean. After being confused for Christine by a local authority investigating the death, Esther decides spontaneously to take on her identity.
Esther is not calculating. After taking on Christine’s identity, Esther stumbles from one deception and its consequences to the next—each one made with assured confidence in the moment, but without much thought to the bigger picture. “There was no grand scheme, simply an image of bliss and contentment.” Esther’s modus operandi mirrors the way many young people glide through their existences, and the hopes they have for their pending adult lives. Aside from the allusions to the Book of Esther, Bergen also nods to Syliva Plath’s Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, here. Both Esthers are young women in unfamiliar environments hoping to find themselves. Both suffer a certain degree of social awkwardness, a general distaste for others, a desire to escape themselves, and a simmering rage toward the patriarchal world in which they’re trying to exist. In the 1960s, Plath’s Esther turned her bottled rage inward, harming herself. Bergen’s present-day Esther is now empowered to turn her rage toward others.
Through this novel, Bergen has provided a complex consideration of what happens when a young woman internalizes damage done to her, and when her fragile connections to the world unravel. Esther Maile is presented as a sort of non-person, “not [interested in] drawing attention to herself.” She is often forgotten—groups of people she’s spent time with don’t remember her name, or that she was present at a certain occasion. She doesn’t fit in, and develops a disdain for and distrust of those who do. Observing young travellers having fun together, “[s]he did not understand. She believed that all of this was a lie, that the surface was light and gladness but underneath there was a teeming self-disgust.” At times when her plot seems close to being discovered, Esther is “disdainful of what she might be accused of, yet giddy that she had been found out,” so desperate is she to be seen.
Esther’s psyche is multilayered. She is presented as stony and psychopathic, but also desperate for and incapable of cultivating love. At one point, when Arnt, a German traveller she’d met in Bali visits her in Thailand, she imagines him chillingly as a set of body parts: “She briefly saw a blank face attached to his ropy neck, in place of his head.” Her next thought, however, is a wish to love him as a mother loves her son. Bergen’s mastery over characterization is evident in the nuance he uses in building Esther. In a genre that could easily depend on caricature, Bergen’s characters are fully developed cocktails of humanity.
Bergen doesn’t feed us Esther’s backstory. Instead, he deftly lays out a labyrinth of crumbs for the reader, suggesting Esther’s wish to shed her former skin is an effort to erase a past sexual trauma. She mentions a man who had befriended her mother after her father died. This man “taught her about winches and pullies. And so on.” Thinking about him, Esther’s “face tingled and her hands went a little bit numb.” Later in the novel, Esther reveals she’s only had sex once before, with an older man, “and the whole event had been sad.” These little clues—the “and so on,” the bodily reaction to a suppressed feeling—are evidence of Bergen’s command over his work and trust in his reader to pull the pieces of Esther together, to feel the satisfaction of completing a puzzle that may look equally different, but be equally satisfying to each person who picks up this novel.
Days of Feasting and Rejoicing is an unsettling read. Its assured and concise prose draws the reader in to wallow in its anxious moodiness, and Bergen’s examination of its boldly dark material inspires deep questions about the human condition, about how we judge right, wrong, and what exists in between.
Days of Feasting and Rejoicing
by David Bergen
Goose Lane Editions, 208 p.p., September 2025, $25 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781773103433
Susan Sanford Blades lives on the territory of the Lekwungen peoples. Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, and The Masters Review.