Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent
long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for
about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in
Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre
Inter and the Prix Decembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de
l'Orient, the Prix litteraire de la Porte Doree, and the Prix du
Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for
Compass.
Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy
from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet,
Maupassant and Blanchot.
‘One of the finest European novels in recent memory.’
— Adrian Nathan West, Literary Review
‘Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure
as Compass. Reading it amounts to wandering into a library
arranged in the form of an exotic sweet shop, full of tempting
fragments of stories guaranteed leaving you wanting more.’
— Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Compass is a challenging, brilliant, and – God help me –
important a novel as is likely to be published this year.’
— Justin Taylor, Los Angeles Times
‘Crisply translated by Charlotte Mandell (as
was Zone), Compass is Proustian in its set-up.
There are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the
human condition.’
— Tobias Grey, Financial Times
‘The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of
regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood
but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within
it. Enard speaks Persian and Arabic, and he has taught at
universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the
Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region, a
“zone,” as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine
books, three of which have been translated into English, he has
charted a course through this zone, writing about sectarian
violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism, tradition,
and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue’s gallery of thieves,
killers, and eccentrics. Enard’s prose, which tends to pile
descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (Zone is
a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But it’s
the larger project of his writing that bears particular
consideration: in his fiction, Enard is constructing an intricate,
history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the
world.’
— Jacob Silverman, New Yorker
‘Enard is like the anti-Houellebecq, and he deserves far more
attention.’
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
‘The beauty of Compass is the sheer breadth and density
of its vision, calling forth a multitude of different worlds, bound
only by the capacious mind of its narrator, an aging Austrian
musicologist named Franz Ritter.’
— Jeffrey Zuckerman, New Republic
‘A love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East ... [a] strangely
powerful work.’
— Steven Poole, Guardian
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