Mathias Enard’s Fifth Book

That’s right. Zone was just the beginning.

This has never happened to me before : upon finishing Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants (~ talk to them about battles, kings and elephants) I was ready to toss a coin in order to decide whether this, Mathias Énard’s fifth book, was a success or not. It may often take me some time to puzzle out details of books, but I have never been as much at a loss about the basic quality of a book as I was in this case. The reason for my bewilderment is due to the highly original structure and writing of the book, and to Énard’s enormous basic skills as a prose writer. The same project and approach, in the hands of a lesser writer, could easily be chalked up as a bad failure. What Énard did was to take a little known episode in the life of the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and develop it in a highly elliptical way. In only 155 narrow pages, the book attempts to do justice not just to a rich and sumptuous setting, but it also tries to contain clashes of civilizations, and the biographies of three of the most remarkable men of their age: Michelangelo himself, Sultan Bayezid II (also known as Bayezid the Just) and the early important Ottoman poet Mesihi of Pristina. Ottoman poetry, the development of a complex architectural structure and the difficulties of being an artist in a violent world that appears to be constantly at war are just a few of the themes that crowd this small book. There is no doubt that no book of this length could do any justice to as convoluted and complicated a set of topics and problems, yet Énard tries. We can see how good a writer he is by the mere fact that his method, an impressionistic, fragmented, superficial narrative that is more about the act of telling stories than about the story it purports to tell . . .

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More from Conversational Reading:

1. Story by Mathias Enard at Three Percent Those who know who Enard is can read it here. Those wondering why this is thrilling news can read this. ...
2. Video of Charlotte Mandell Reading and Discussing Zone by Mathias Enard Mandell’s translation of Zone, the 500-page, 1-sentence novel is forthcoming, eventually, from Open Letter. You can whet your appetite for Zone by reading The Quarterly...
3. Mathias Enard’s Zone Acquired by Open Letter I’ve just learned that the experimental French novel Zone will be published in English by Chad Post’s Open Letter press, with the translation done by...
4. Talking About Zone Steve Mitchelmore has a post up about Zone, which is the first piece of writing I've seen about the book since TQC's piece a couple...
5. French Novel of the Decade Christophe Claro says Zone by Mathias Énard is going to be huge. Claro, of course, does know a little about postmodern writing. Here’s some more...

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