Reading Mathias Énard, one doesn’t sense any anxiety about the fate of the novel. Although some of Énard’s narrators play Tetris or log on to social media sites, they are generally bookish to the core and enamored of high culture, their own inner worlds, and the many connections that can be made between the two. In the work of the prolific French writer, one comes to expect certain things: historical details, geopolitical thinking, elevated, sometimes baroque prose, intoxicants, violence, voluptuous solitude, troubled personal affairs, and a manifold sensuality—a zest for music, facts, literary language, the things that, to use a word he is fond of, caress the mind.
Énard’s leading men are students of their own shortcomings. They’re apt to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time and feel the abyss open beneath them. In Zone, Énard’s first book to be translated into English,1 in 2010, there is a climactic scene in which the narrator, an intelligence operative based in Paris, learns that his girlfriend—also in intelligence—is pregnant. He fixates on a gift that he has bought her in Prague, a trinket supposedly made by inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp: “I handed her the little glass star, you almost broke it, her eyes misted over a little, she murmured that’s all you have to say?” After she flees his apartment, he notices the bottle of champagne that she stashed in his fridge, gets drunk, warms to the idea of fatherhood, then accidently crushes the glass star underfoot. She gets an abortion the next day.
Zone unfolds mostly as a four-hundred-plus-page single-sentence meditation on atrocity, espionage, and literary outlaws. The narrator’s wised-up erudition and world-weary reflections are rendered in a pileup of thoughts and historical musings. There are vignettes about Burroughs, Lowry, Joyce, Choukri, Céline, and Proust. We don’t learn the name behind the novel’s “I” (Francis) until page 166.
Francis’s internal monologue takes place on an overnight train from Paris to Rome, spurred on by the amphetamine he took that morning to counterbalance the two hours of sleep he squeezed out of the alcohol-soaked night before. His thoughts drift to the two years he spent fighting on the side of the Croats in the Bosnian War, the time he spent in Venice trying to tame his memories, and his subsequent career in French intelligence, keeping tabs on the Arab world.
Traveling under an assumed identity lifted from a high school friend—a neo-Nazi who is locked away in a mental institution—Francis is en route to the Vatican to sell, “like any merchandise, pizza, flowers,” a suitcase full of secret discs, collected over five years, that document a staggering range of twentieth-century atrocities spread across Europe and the Middle East. Francis is not just an archivist of war crimes: during the Bosnian War he raped Muslim women and participated in civilian executions. Yet what stings for him is leaving behind his comrades.
Francis’s ruminations are interrupted by excerpts from a conventionally punctuated novel that he occasionally reads. This novel-within-the-novel concerns Intissar, a female Palestinian soldier serving in the 1982 Lebanon War. It commences with a meditation on feet and loserdom:
Defeat begins with the boots that you polished every morning, the ones that grew misshapen, covered with dust, the ones that kept the blood from your toes as well as they could, that crushed insects…. Physical at first, like a cramp that makes you limp, defeat is a weary surprise, you begin to stumble, in war you totter on fragile feet.
Intissar, who will go on to put herself at great risk to retrieve the body of her lover from an area under Israeli control, wonders to herself “whether Palestine really exists.”
Énard, who has translated literary works from Farsi and Arabic into French, has long been engaged with the plight of the Palestinians and the struggles of the working class in the Middle East. (His books also show a great sensitivity to the Shoah.) Toward the end of Zone, Francis recollects his contact in the Mossad lamenting the recent death of Arafat—“We knew him, after all, we had locked him up like a monkey in the zoo”—then goes on:
Gaza the insane continues on its way to the end of the world in hatred and cries for vengeance, abandoned, and the only comforts that reach it are the few missiles that absent-minded pilots launch from time to time from the sky always blue…in Gaza everything is so close together it’s impossible to aim said [the contact] sighing, civilian victims were the Israeli army’s cross to bear, pursued by the ghosts of dead children.
Énard is interested in the transformative potential of cultural exchange, how it can broaden and sharpen a person’s sense of self, or lead to a shrinking of personality, a retreat into cant. This theme extends from Zone to his other, quite different novels: Street of Thieves (2012, translated 2014), an intellectual thriller; Compass (2015, translated 2017), a portrait of generations of Orientalists told in long erudite paragraphs that recall the density of Zone; Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (2010, translated 2018), whose compact lyrical form and deft use of the second person anticipate his newest novel, The Deserters; and The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild (2020, translated 2023), which depicts a kind of Orientalism within one’s own country, in the encounter of a Parisian anthropologist with a rural village in western France.
In Street of Thieves, Énard gives voice to a resilient young Arab man from Tangier. Lakhdar shares Francis’s passion for reading and his troubles with women. At seventeen, his father walks in on him getting it on with a female cousin and ejects him from the house after a vigorous beating. Lakhdar spends the next ten months living rough in other cities in Morocco, then returns to Tangier, where he looks up his best friend, Bassam—who displays a susceptibility to rigid ideology and violence much like that of Francis’s high school friend in Zone.
From Bassam, he learns that his cousin was sent away by her mother to a remote village. He writes her letters that he never sends, “out of cowardliness”—a common self-reproach among Énard’s male characters. Thanks to Bassam, Lakhdar finds work as a bookseller for an Islamist organization called the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought. Then, after a terrorist attack in Marrakech, in which he suspects the group’s involvement, he gets a job as a copyist at a publishing mill. Here Lakhdar encounters an archive of violent death as he types out for a digitization project the handwritten files. (Archive fever of one form or another routinely finds its way into Énard’s books.)
Lakhdar is a sensitive young man who works long hours for little money and misses his family. Still, like other Ènard characters, he measures himself against the male ideal in his head: insouciant, whiskey-soaked, obdurate. “I appreciated alcohol for the image it gave me, of a hard, adult male, who fears neither his mother’s anger nor God’s,” he recounts, and then wonders, “Why do we cling to these images that form us, these examples that shape us and can break us.” In a similar manner, Francis speaks of how he simplified his apprehension of reality when he was a soldier: “The male archetype we were all trying to resemble, strong, skillful, prehistoric hunter free of a brain…scorning the weak, women and homos, anything that doesn’t look like him.”
But identity is a slippery thing in Énard’s work. On the train to Rome Francis reflects, “It’s very strange to think today that I contributed to the liberation of a country that is starting to matter less and less to me, distant, hazy, where I almost never go.” Lakhdar’s journey is from immaturity toward a hard-won cosmopolitanism—yet he is telling his story from a Spanish prison. Early in the novel, he says of himself and Bassam, “We were seventeen, but more like twelve in our heads. We weren’t very clever.” Then near the end he says, “I am what I have read, I am what I have seen, I have as much Arabic in me as Spanish and French, I have been multiplied in those mirrors until I have been lost or rebuilt, fragile image, image in motion.”
While still a bookseller, he forms a romantic bond with a Spanish student of Arabic who is on vacation in Tangier. Lakhdar is astonished by her interest in his culture, but spending time with her also makes him wary of his compatriots:
Walking with Judit was to receive, at every street corner, a serious quantity of symbolic gobs of spit, because I was a young Moroccan, and strolling in the company of a European girl without, seemingly, belonging to the social class that…could allow itself anything. Judit herself realized it, and I felt she was sorry for me, which made me even sadder.
Lakhdar luxuriates in writing to her in French and using the language as a vehicle for his first attempts at poetry, because he doesn’t feel oppressed by the weight of a foreign tradition.
Self-discovery through another culture and the dangers of that pursuit are the major concerns of Énard’s Prix Goncourt–winning novel Compass. Like Zone, it is structured as a monologue delivered by an insomniac narrator. Unlike Francis or Lakhdar, though, Franz Ritter has lived a mostly sedate existence as a musicologist whose work afforded him the opportunity to travel safely between Europe and the Middle East when he was younger. It is 2012, and as night stretches over Vienna Franz thinks about opium, his upstairs neighbor’s loud dog, and the troubling diagnosis he received only hours earlier. Yet even as he worries about his health, his thoughts circle around his long, complicated relationship with Sarah, a peripatetic academic currently in Malaysia. When she last visited Vienna she stayed at a hotel rather than at his apartment, which he took as a rejection. He worries too about her article she had sent him earlier in the day, on the “wine of the dead”—a funeral rite practiced in parts of Southeast Asia in which the recently deceased are placed in earthen jars and left to decompose. The morbidity of the article troubles him and makes him think of the dissertation she wrote in the late 1990s, which she had shared with him. It opened with a discussion of the great Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat, the author of the novella The Blind Owl (1936), who in 1951 committed suicide in Paris:
Hedayat had one of those wounds of self that make you reel through the world; it was that crevice that opened up until it became a crevasse; in this there is, as in opium, or in alcohol, or in anything that splits you in half, not an illness but a decision, a will to fissure your being, until the very end.
Énard is a poet of fissures—another word that recurs in his novels. In Zone, Francis says, “I cracked, fissured like a clay wall slowly drying, in Venice it was a collapse followed by ghostly wandering through the hallways of the Zone”; in Street of Thieves, Lakhdar thinks of his hometown, Tangier, as “a black dead end, a corridor blocked by the sea; the Strait of Gibraltar a fissure, an abyss that barred our dreams.” Franz worries that Sarah may have followed her intellectual wanderlust into her own dangerous fissure.
Through his travels, Franz has known colleagues who have suffered various kinds of physical, psychological, and moral collapse while immersed in their studies of foreign cultures. There is the German archaeologist Michael Bilger, who went mad, believing he had been struck by the Pharaoh’s curse; the young French researcher Marc Faugier, who lost himself in opium over the course of his studies of Turkish prostitution; and Gilbert de Morgan, Sarah’s thesis supervisor, a French specialist in Persian culture who—at the dawn of the Iranian Revolution—descended into a complex form of treachery, worming his way into the confidence of another Frenchman’s Iranian fiancée and sexually assaulting her.
Franz’s restless thoughts turn over the ethics of Orientalism and its shifting conception of what constitutes the foreign, the exotic, the Other. His dark thoughts are tempered by an inner catalog of cross-cultural encounters made possible by an active interest in the Other—this being a relative term, not the province of any single nationality. Thus he celebrates, for example, Khalil Sherif Pasha, an Egyptian who worked as an Ottoman diplomat and who commissioned some of Courbet’s most famous works, including The Origin of the World, and Naim Frashëri, the national poet of Albania who wrote in Albanian, Greek, Turkish, and Persian. Compass presents many arguments for and against Orientalism—how the discipline has served as a conduit for domination, and how on the other hand it makes room for the Other in the self—but the novel’s structure comes down in its favor.2 By the end, Franz realizes that Sarah’s insistence on staying at a hotel room was not a romantic slight but a subtle invitation that he had failed to perceive. Every beloved is an Other, the book makes plain, a hopeful note capping its hundreds of melancholic pages.
In contrast to Compass and Zone, erudite books given over to men cogitating in cramped spaces, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a book of the body, filled with food, drink, and excrement. Set in and around the village of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe in the Deux-Sèvres region of France, it has a time-hopping picaresque form based around the by now quaint idea that everything is connected. This notion is present in Zone and Compass, which both cite the Buddhist concept of the Wheel that binds all living things into cycles of death and rebirth, but The Annual Banquet uses it as a structuring principle. (And it’s usually the women in the book, much like Sarah in Compass, who perceive this reality most clearly.) The characters live, die, and are reincarnated into human and nonhuman forms. A murderer is transformed into a worm, a woman into a dog, a postman into a Parisian academic, and a priest into a boar—whose olfactory assessment of people is that they are “a mixture of vanity, cruelty and detergent.” The novel is full of vignettes, some based on characters’ past lives and others connected to the history of the area, from the Romans to the partisans of wars during and after the Middle Ages, to the pensioners and exurbanites who make their homes there in the twenty-first century. This cornucopia of stories creates an effect of dizzying surfeit.
David, the central character, is a twenty-nine-year-old Parisian anthropologist who plans to write his dissertation on the habits of the people in the region. Though affable, he betrays a city slicker’s condescension toward his rural environment; he nicknames the living quarters that he rents from a local couple “the Savage Mind.” When the mayor of the village, an otherwise amiable man who talks about “the Arabs” and is proudly anti-immigrant, offers to introduce David to its oldest inhabitant, he accepts without enthusiasm. The resident in question is consistently referred to with derision—“the old geezer,” “the pervy old bastard”—or merely via his relationships to others: “grandfather,” “father,” “Louise’s son.” He is, in other words, a nonperson in the community.
David interviews the man for three hours:
The ethnologist was sweating blood attempting to transcribe the old man’s tale, to decipher his ancient, savage tongue, the vernacular of the earth and the violence of the land little heard these days, since it makes people feel ashamed…. Had he been more perceptive, or more curious, the young investigator might have heard the story of the old man’s parents—the mother impregnated in a pleasureless coupling, her head against a tree stump, in a glade where the pale buttocks of her rapist glistened in the spring sunshine…the mother beaten until she bled by her father, who howled with rage as he whipped her, inveighing against God, life, women, all the humiliations against which man is powerless.
After the elderly man has died and David finally listens to the interview, he is duly chagrined by his earlier apathy. By then he is involved with Lucie, the man’s granddaughter. When he meets Lucie’s parents at the funeral, he chafes at hearing himself referred to as a Parisian:
I know the word trips off the tongue, but there’s a huge difference between the Paris of fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements…. Even in Paris we have our distinctions. And besides, the noun “Parisian” makes it sound absolute, irrevocable, incapable of integrating.
David takes up a career as an organic farmer alongside Lucie—a fitting return-to-the-land finale for a book that has spent four hundred pages probing the idea of French soil.
Of all Énard’s books, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the most stylistically varied. It embraces a number of different tones and genres, from peasant speech to the eclogue. At its center is a three-day extravaganza that brings together gravediggers from all over France for feasting, poetry recitals, and toasts to death:
The wine’s not red, it’s purple-black,
So deep and dense one must attack
It both with teeth and tongue…
A gravedigger who sups it might toss off
Eight bottles in a single quaff
To slake his thirst in days unsung
Toward the end Arnaud, Lucie’s cousin, whom most people see as an idiot savant—he can recite a smorgasbord of historical facts tied to any calendar date but can’t otherwise carry on a conversation—is revealed to be, in fact, a seer:
Arnaud could see the sufferings and sorrows, the violence and joy that marked a soul like the wrinkles of a face and, to him, such a miracle seemed entirely ordinary; he listened to his grandfather’s lives as one might listen to a spring babbling over pebbles.
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild possesses a quality of bonhomie that distinguishes it from the writer’s other books available in English. It’s silly, at times, in a measured way—David googles astrological compatibility, and wonders what Walter Benjamin would have thought of cybersex. Even its cyclical arrangement gives it a kind of detached levity; its many accounts of violence are mitigated by the fact that villains receive their comeuppance in the next life.
The Deserters, Énard’s most recent book to be published in English, also shows him in a more accommodating mode. It is briskly paced, features passages of breathless beauty, and feels in some way like a summation of his predilections: there are musings from the vantage point of a war criminal, odes to the solitary life of the mind, and dismay over the friction between the West and the Muslim world.
The book is composed of two alternating storylines, delivered in alternating chapters, that never quite converge. It opens in a sort of timeless aftermath of conflict, with an unnamed soldier taking off his grimy boots and seeing “two toes, flesh and earth, emerge from the sock, they’re fat spattered worms crawling out of a dark trunk, knotted at the ankle.” (The poor feet recall not only the beginning of Intissar’s story in Zone but also the death of Lucie’s grandfather’s stepfather in The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild: he was “found…hanging from a joist in the barn,” with a “hole in [the] left sock through which a fat, accusatory toe pointed at the door.”)
Recriminations haunt the deserter, who questions the value of his life yet also wants more of it. On the slopes of an unnamed mountain, high above the sea, his story unfolds in a mix of the second and third person. The “you” circles him, needling, admonishing, accusing, and stripping away any shred of vanity:
you stink of blood and shit,
you stink of sleep and hunger,
a child could kill you with one punch.
With much difficulty, he makes it to his family’s austere hunting cabin. Hours after his arrival, he surprises a woman walking past the property with a one-eyed donkey, on her way to the border. They recognize each other; the war has turned neighbors into Others. The woman, her shorn brown hair an emblem of the abuse she has suffered, recoils in terror and faints after he shoots in her direction. He locks her in the hut, then goes out hunting. She is able to escape fairly easily and is later injured in a thunderstorm.
In telling the deserter’s story, Énard makes expressive use of line breaks. The technique is especially effective when he describes the man listening to the storm:
anything that had a breath of life in its nostrils is perishing,
it’s snowing shards of glass, splinters of ice—except
except snow is soft and slow this hail is pure violence
Without fully understanding his actions—why he didn’t kill her, why he locked her in the hut—the deserter finds the injured woman and nurses her back to health. (“War and torture have taught him all he knows about anatomy, all he knows about women.”)
The Deserters’ second plotline, tied to a more specific time and place, revolves around the late mathematician Paul Heudeber, whom we learn about through his correspondence with Maja, the love of his life, and the reminiscences of their daughter, Irina, a math historian who is sorting through her parents’ letters. Paul’s fame rests on a hybrid book of poetry and mathematics that he wrote during his time in Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned for being a member of the Communist Party. Of particular importance to mathematicians is his demonstration of the twin prime conjecture, which states that pairs of prime numbers—e.g., 11 and 13, 191 and 193—continue into infinity.
Looking back more than twenty years later, Irina—narrating in the first person—remembers the conference that was organized to honor her father’s legacy, which opened, then abruptly closed, on September 11, 2001. The night before, her mother told her that she was glad that the twentieth century was over and that she hoped the new century would be a more enlightened one.
As the conference’s remaining attendees gather around a table on the evening of the eleventh, the book’s two narrative lines are symbolically brought together, as two of the attendees, Isidro Baza and Alma Sejdić, describe the debt they owe to Heudeber. Baza, an elderly geometrician who fought in the Spanish Civil War—“on the wrong side,” someone later tells Irina—says it was Heudeber who kindled his interest in mathematics when they were interned at the Gurs camp in southwestern France. Sejdić describes how she came across Heudeber’s book, The Buchenwald Conjectures, which combines mathematics and poetic introspection, after she fled Bosnia in 1994:
This terrifying confinement under torture…reminded me of what I myself had experienced during the war (she looked straight at the ex-Yugoslav, who was nodding in virile compassion) and made me cry for days: thanks to the Conjectures I could look my trauma in the face, it had become an analyzable, external object, and I knew immediately that I wanted to pursue these works, that is, literary works, works in this particular branch of mathematics that is literature, and, more precisely, poetry, which is the algebra of literature.
Baza’s conscription and Sejdić’s long brown hair and memories of torture echo the story of the nameless deserter and the woman. But neither Baza nor Sejdić can be reduced to their counterpart in the other story—a literary demonstration of twin primes.
Reading and rereading Énard’s books over the past year—pretty much to the exclusion of any others—has been quite a journey. I’m a black American who has felt most in tune with the world over the extended periods I spent in Greece as a child and in France as an adult. The ease I experienced in Athens contrasted wildly with the stress I felt when I returned to the United States for the seventh grade and enrolled in a public school where the kids instinctively self-segregated. Later, in college, when I lived in Paris for half a year, I felt what it was like to be an American, and not an African American.
In Street of Thieves, Lakhdar finds in the camaraderie of the Arab migrants he encounters in Spanish bars reason to say, “The unity of the Arab world existed only in Europe.”
Énard’s books articulate a sentiment that might baffle many of today’s nationalists: that it’s not unnatural for people to feel more at ease in other cultures, precisely because they are not their own.
English (US) · 