Description

By (author) Enard Mathias; Translated by Mandell Charlotte

Short /annotation:
From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, an epic, furious novel that shows the dangers of ideology and the aftermath of war

:
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness—he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and—pulled together in Mathias Énard’s enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose—time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.

Review quote:
“A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past…feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey—Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero—endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of The Deserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.”

Review quote:
“A novel in counterpoint—Énard explores the role of the sciences in the past century’s horrors, even as he depicts an innate humanity in the bond between the soldier and the woman. In Charlotte Mandell’s translation from the French, the melding of themes is reproduced on the level of the language, which shifts from crisp scholarly exposition to vivid poetic fragments. Synthesizing so many ideas and styles is customary for this brilliant author; his formal skill and provocative intelligence remain well worth the encounter.”

Review quote:
“With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from ”the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.” It’s a masterpiece.”

Review quote:
“”A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.””

Review quote:
“”All of Énard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.””

Review quote:
“Two seemingly unconnected narratives—one saturated with history, the other scrubbed of all historical referents—explore themes of trauma and loss in this formally inventive novel… Énard uses their contrasting textures to sometimes unsettling but ultimately revelatory effect.”

Review quote:
“A novelist of Europe’s real and imaginative frontiers, Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell.”

Review quote:
“The Deserters relies on mathematics, but the content is literature. Both – form and content – are masterfully constructed.”

Biographical note:
Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize); The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers” Guild; Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants; Zone; and Street of Thieves. A Chevalier de l”Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Charlotte Mandell has