Like most humans, she had a single heart

The sense of space as a controlled substance is overpowering, except you don't know where it's going to take you.

The Silk Road is magic. I don't understand how any of it works, and I'm sure there are more elements in play than I suspect, but it fills me with awe and joy.

Next she took someone's head and lifted it like it wasn't part of a human body, a cabbage or a planet or the repository of all good thoughts and evil, which, when you think about it, is exactly what a human head is.

The book opens in the labyrinth, one woman guiding bodies on yoga mats in Savasana (corpse pose).

This was the most challenging of the poses if you took into account the fact that the room was filled with people who knew the world was coming to an end and that if we worked at it hard enough we would never die.

One of them dies (murder?). Is it a tenth body, or one of the nine "named" persons (the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook, and Jee Moon)? Is it someone from their past — Mother, Father, or are they already dead long ago? Is it someone they even know at all? 

It's a labyrinth of memory and shared consciousness. While the environs seem to shift from a settlement in the icy lands of caribou to Le Puy-en-Velay and Aubrac, the journey is primarily interior, some spiritual plane on which they remember and commune, though some things they decided to forget. All the paths are marked by cairns.

How is it possible for the solid objects around us to melt away into the past, and for a new order of objects to emerge mysteriously from the future?

I would make the case that the entire novel takes place on their yoga mats, always in the labyrinth, a spiritual investigation, processing life and birth and death and tragedy and love and desire and heartbreak, the mystery of being, and being one with it all.

The journey along the Silk Road is not one from their memory; it is a metaphor of the human condition, travelled "for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, and unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm." "Everyone was using it, for commerce or as a means of escape." "What everyone had in common was lack of destination."

They had been children together — siblings, it seems. (And Jee Moon, an outsider but always present.) They squabble like children. But they are like some cosmic beings, inhabiting tubes of skin and learning to tell one another apart. One of them has two hearts. One of them may not have a heart. One of them (the Archivist?) will have the black spot on the skin, a sign of the sickness.

The Topologist visits a shrine to Saint Roch. Saint Roch was also their elementary school. There are many dogs (and fleas), and the Plague (are all plagues so much the same?).

Everyone was heading north, the sickness not having arrived there yet. Everyone knew it was a physical condition — they were that knowledgeable — but the extent of what they knew was compromised by exposure to a glut of information and rumor, making it difficult to predict anything.

The Geographer has a husband, and a child. The Cook is a widower. The Topologist met the Swede. The Astronomer fell for Jee Moon. A long time ago, the Archivist fell in love with a poet.

We all had our love stories. This was true even for the Archivist, whose misfortune it had been to fall in love as a child with a girl who grew up to be a famous poet. Like most humans, she had a single heart, and that heart had room in it for only one person — that person being herself. The spirit of the age was compounded of arrogance and inattention, the predominant humor begotten of the chylus, cold and moist.

A game of Hangman: Eight letters, two Es and an X at the end. Sardines. Tarot cards.

While she walked, the Topologist felt herself becoming aroused. It was as if whatever lay beneath her had its attention fixed amorously on the cleft between her legs. She felt like she was naked from the waist down, hungrily observed and getting wet, her breath coming faster and faster. 

Walking can do that, said the Keeper. It's perfectly normal. She was trying to be reassuring, like a mother.

Sphagnum subnitens, said the Iceman. Glittering sphagnum. All it thinks about is sex.

This novel is a puzzle I can't solve, and it's surprising and gorgeous. Expansive, boundless.

Excerpts
Fairy Tale Review
Granta 

Reviews
LARB: Journey to Death: On Kathryn Davis’s "The Silk Road"
Slate: My Soul Is Going on a Trip