MATHIAS ÉNARD'S DIVINE COMEDY
ON THE CONTEMPORARY GOAT
1. ZONE (2008), (TR. CHARLOTTE MANDEL, 2010)
FRANCIS MIRKOVIC IS IN HELL.
He’s on a train ride from Milan to Rome, on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, meth’d out, thinking about violence.
He got a suitcase that contains a
list of dead people you’ve been gathering for some time now by using more or less illegally the means that Foreign Security puts at your disposal, you see everything is written here
it’s a list of war crimes & war criminals from the last 50 years.
The printer’s ink is bleeding into his brain, infecting his thoughts with the history of war in the region around the Mediterranean, the “zone” that gives the book its name; especially his own involvement in the Yugoslav War, the horrors he witnessed during those,
two years of amphetamines, two years of cultivating the body, two years of fear of dying in the mud, huge hangovers two years of bullets bombs and drugs it was a miracle I thought that Marianne waited for me, that she came to join me in Venice which was not a romantic choice but a way of disappearing, an island outside of time and outside of space, a tomb for me and for Andrija who was rotting in my memories as he was decomposing in the earth
This is why Énard is goated.
These books that seem to be about grand, heady themes are actually about intimacy; romantic love & friendships, the domestic wars of life,
and if in love the union of bodies gives each the illusion of profound knowledge of the other, so the effluvia of fighters, their sweat and their blood, gives the illusion of intimacy
ÉNARD’S MEN ARE FUCK UPS in love. . .
Marianne comes to see Francis in Venice after he leaves the Bosnian front; he’s down bad, depressed, he’s been at war for 2 years!
He keeps leaving Marianne behind in the hotel room and goes drinking with his buddy,
coming back home drunk from a night of endless talk, Ghassan and I, it must be six or seven in the morning, I almost haven’t seen Marianne at all the two or three proceeding days, she in light and I in darkness and there she was on the bridge, in the grey dawn, pajamas on under her coat, her hair loose, pale, rings under her eyes, and when I go up to her worried she lands me a furious kick right in the balls which doubles me over cuts off my breath and she disappears. . . I clutch my abdomen my head against the parapet not understanding what’s just happened not realizing that my aching testicles are sounding the alarm, that this unexpected shot from Marianne is propelling me out of Venice, I’ll never see her again, she took the first train, she left, and I did too, shaken all of a sudden by her despair
Like Bolaño (who lowkey might be the biggest influence on him), Énard is very interested in the way that men ruin women: with their violence, their negligence.
It’s the story of Francis Mirkovic’s life; he loses everybody who could’ve loved him.
Marianne’s gone for good, it’s a grim & depressing scene. . . but isn’t it so funny she kicks him in the balls?
Énard is consistently very funny; his three tomes are comedies, because of, not despite the fact that they are staring down infernal, brutal, dead-serious subject matter.
HERE’S FRANCIS AS A HORNY TEENAGER peeping while his mother gives a beautiful girl a piano lesson,
I felt the friction of her buttocks against the burgundy felt, the movement of her thigh when she leaned on the pedal, and I got a terrible erection, an immense desire that drove me to the bathroom as a Liszt etude or a Chopin Polonaise (she was gifted) resounded, the rhythm of her fingers on the keyboard must have been, I imagine, my own on my personal instrument, in desire and in music, while I hated Liszt, Chopin, and all those horrible maternal notes I came terribly, too quickly, the desired student was made to start again because of her tempo and it was my mother’s voice more than once that interrupted my pleasure, with her no, no, no, not so fast, not so fast, from the neighboring room she seemed to be directing my masturbation herself, start over, start over, with that martial tone that had the gift of making me enraged beyond belief
YES! Énard is a French pervert, DUH!
PLENTY OF GUYS ARE creepy, horny teenagers that don’t grow up to be Francis.
But he was a lost teenager and he fell into war; he became a man,
becoming a man didn’t mean growing up but sharpening yourself, reducing yourself, pruning yourself like a vine or a tree from which you take away the branches little by little, the female part, or the human part, who knows, a classic garden hedge sculpted into the shape of a warrior, you could just as easily say into the shape of a phallus, a rifle, the male archetype we were all trying to resemble
How is he ever supposed to have a healthy relationship with a woman?
BEFORE HE GOT ON THE TRAIN, a madman stuck his hand out to him,
“comrade one last shake before the end of the world” I don’t shake it afraid he’s right, he must be forty, no older, and he has that keen prying gaze of fanatics who ask you questions because they’ve just discovered an instant brother in you, I hesitate before the outstretched arm terrified by that screwy smile and I answer ‘no thanks’ as if he were selling me a newspaper or offering me a smoke
This is an apocalyptic moment in Francis’s life.
Apocalypse in the sense of revelation. He’s betraying his past like Judas, in his briefcase there’s secrets he’s gonna sell at the Vatican
to trembling prelates, in return for hard cash, I set the amount at $300,000, thinking that the irony wouldn’t escape the church, thirty pieces of silver, they didn’t breathe a word, agreed without a murmur, without daring to bargain with the sinner over the price of treason
He’s on his way to start a new life:
yesterday I celebrated the departure the end of a life I so want this interlude to be over, the kilometers that separate me from my new existence to have already been traveled, everything comes to him who knows how to wait says the proverb, Marianne’s body haunts me despite the years and the bodies that succeeded hers
But of course, the past is never past.
Can we free ourselves?
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE FORM.
You hear about a lot of the pyrotechnical blah-blah-blah with this book; it’s ONE SENTENCE?!?!? EGADS!
To be fair, that’s what got me into the book, hearing it was one continuous sentence. But I think it could just as equally scare people away.
So let me tell you: Zone is in NO functional way, a single sentence.
It’s really 24 Cantos (24 cause that’s the number of chapters in the Iliad, bruh!).
21 of which are breathless poetic ruminations on the history of the Zone and Francis’s personal history.
3 of which are sections from a novel Francis is reading on the train about Palestinian fighters during the Lebanese civil war.
I think calling them Cantos is right. The epigraph of the book is the opening lines of Pound’s first Canto, and then after the last page there’s a post-graph coda: the closing lines of the Cantos, Pound’s most beautiful verse:
To confess wrong without losing rightness: Charity
have I had sometimes, I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
To lead back to splendour
And the Cantos are the right reference point because Zone is about a fascist trying to make sense of his own life amid the wreckage of history, just like Pound’s great work.
ÉNARD IS A SCHOLAR OF ARABIC.
His touchstone is the 1001 Nights. There are so many stories in Zone.
We get the one-eyed fascist José Millán-Astray; we get Malcolm Lowry in close-combat with his wife until she ditched him, came back the next morning and found him dead; we get Caravaggio organizing decapitations so he can study the anatomy; and that ain’t even scratching the bottom of the barrel.
But this ain’t bric-a-brac,
This is literature.
We try to understand ourselves through stories: literature & history & other people, because the point of literature, of living (evinced by Énard! Shakespeare! Dante! any writer worth his salt!) is change.
Can we change?
How the fuck does one go about that?
FRANCIS IS A REAL-DEAL FUCKING SAVAGE.
He’s participated in some of the worst things a person can do: murder, rape, all the fucking etcetera.
We’re right in his head the whole time; there’s no moral ambivalence about what he’s done, it’s just what he’s done.
Énard ain’t fingerwagging at him from an ivory tower; he’s identifying with him, as should we.
Because all his sins stem from ills that afflict us too: cowardice, fear, anger, lust; but the accident & conditions of Francis’s life allow those things to turn in to travesties.
THE FINAL DEVASTATION, the one that leads him to this train, is with Stephanie.
He’s done with war, that’s all behind him; he met her at the Intelligence Agency; one day she takes a look at his file, and that’s a terrible mistake,
she locked me up in my violence with no forgiveness
But she tries to forgive him, to love him, but his past of brutality keeps bleeding into the present and one day. . .
she shows up to his apartment unannounced, after he’s been on one of his missions collecting war crime info,
I heard her climbing the stairs, a little anxious, why was she coming, maybe one of those proofs of love that you plug the cracks with, a surprise, she came in smiling and kissed me tenderly saying just surprise! . . . I hazarded I forgot your birthday, is that it? she gave a slightly false laugh, how stupid can you be. . . Stéphanie whispered I’m expecting a baby and let herself slide into the armchair, looking at me intensely, I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t sure I understood, the usual phrase was I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant and not I’m expecting a baby, 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? we were on opposite sides of a river, making incomprehensible signs to each other, I replied, and you? I felt absolutely nothing at this announcement
Stéphanie runs off heartbroken.
She was gonna give him a chance. He fucked it up. The next day he goes to meet her and she tells him she got an abortion, she tells him,
you are a monster I know everything about you you are a monster I never want to see you again
And he thinks, now, on the train, on the day celebrating the immaculately conceived Jesus Christ, when the reason for the destruction of his seed was its evil conception,
today what would I say to her I would say to her I loved you more than anything don’t be mad at me I would tell her the story of Intissar the Palestinian saved by Marwan’s ghost, all that is very far away, Stéphanie is very far away the child we have is very far away in limbo
But here’s a new life, Francis thinks at the very end, I am going to change,
life is new life is alive I know it now, I can stand up all on my own, I don’t need this suitcase any more, don’t need the Vatican’s pieces of silver, I’m going to throw it all into the water
Will Francis change?
Nobody changes in hell.
2. COMPASS (2015), (TR CHARLOTTE MANDEL, 2017)
FRANZ RITTER IS IN PURGATORY.
(Hans Reiter from 2666 anyone??)
Franz is a musicologist & insomniac who just found out he’s sick and gonna die.
He’s up all night in his Vienna apartment thinking about the love of his life who got away: Sarah.
Compass is a capacious book, here’s a description of this novel under the guise of a description of Sarah’s doctoral thesis,
there was something strong and innovative in these four hundred pages on the images and representations of the Orient, non-places, utopias, ideological fantasies in which many who had wanted to travel had gotten lost: the bodies of artists, poets, and travelers who had tried to explore them were pushed little by little toward destruction; illusion, as Hedayat said, ate away at the soul in solitude—what had long been called madness, melancholy, depression was often the result of a friction, a loss of self in creation, in contact with alterity. . . it all seems to me today a little over-hasty, romantic, to be honest
In Zone, Francis’s contact with the Other is pernicious; they’re on “opposite sides of a river” and that leads to misunderstanding, violence, despondency.
Compass is a lament for the deleterious effects of difference and an exploration of the hope of cosmopolitanism. . .
About how the Other can transform your life & art into something accentuatedly beautiful.
FRANZ IS A BIT OF A BUMBLING FOOL.
He goes to visit Sarah in Paris after a night they had in Tehran that began & ended their romantic involvement heartbreakingly.
Sarah seems depressed,
She holds out her hands to me, smiles, says she’s very happy to see me again. Of course I should not have pointed out to her right away that she had lost a lot of weight, that she was pale, her eyes lined, that wasn’t very clever; but I was so surprised by these physical transformations, so pushed to futility by anguish, that I couldn’t help myself, and the day, that day I had brought about, worked on, waited for, imagined, started off on a lamentable footing. . . she kept a sticky silence, while I lurched into hysterical chatter. . .
“Franz, you’re getting on my nerves. It’s incredible. You’ve been talking without interruption for two kilometers. Good Lord how talkative you can be!”
He thinks she’s dating someone else, and they get in an argument about Beethoven; she gets mad at him,
It was very selfish on my part to bother her mid-thesis with my jealousy, what a pretentious idiot: I was acting jealous when I should’ve been taking care of her, looking after her, and above all not getting on my Beethovenian high horse, which I’ve noticed, with time, never makes me very popular with women.
And he goes on to tell us a wonderful story about Beethoven playing a private concert at a rich woman’s house, in front of a woman he loves,
Beethoven, who hasn’t gone out in society for months — like the big cats it’s no doubt hunger that draws him out of his sad lair, he needs money, love and money… He is in love, but with a love that he senses, either because of his illness or the young woman’s high birth, will produce nothing but music. . . Beethoven starts to play his twenty-seventh sonata, composed a few months earlier, with vivacity, feeling, and expression. The audience trembles a little; there’s a murmur that Beethoven can’t hear. . . the piano, perhaps because of the heating, hasn’t kept its tune and sounds terribly off-key—Beethoven’s fingers play perfectly. . . for the audience, it’s a sonorous catastrophe. . . I can’t help but think of the shame and embarrassment of all declarations of love that fall flat, and I’ll blush with shame sitting in my bed with the light on if I think of that again, we play our sonata all alone without realizing the piano is out of tone, overcome by our emotions: others hear how off-key we sound, and we at best feel sincere pity, at worse a terrible humiliation that sullies them when they themselves had usually, asked for nothing—
Franz is a hopeless romantic, playing his off-key sonata for Sarah; but despite being bumbling & pedantic, he has a good heart, he isn’t damned like Francis.
Sarah is gone now, but not forever.
FRANZ IS SOMETHING OF AN ADVENTURER.
And what I mean when I talk about Énard’s cosmopolitanism is that there is this sense that every culture is distinct & extraordinarily rich, and engaging with its history, its people, in not colonial, but open & curious terms, is a way to robustly enrich your life.
The first time Franz goes to Istanbul, he plays the Western European dolt,
Mother had forced me to take soap, laundry detergent, a first-aid kit, and an umbrella. My trunk weighed thirty-six kilos, which caused me trouble at the Schwechat airport; I had to leave some of the contents with mother, who’d had the good taste to accompany me. . . impossible to slip her the package of detergent, the shoehorn, or my hiking boots, she said, “But that’s indispensable, you can’t leave without a shoehorn! Plus it weighs nothing,” why not a bootjack while I was at it, I was already bringing a whole assortment of ties and jackets “in case I get invited over by respectable people.” . . . that suitcase became my cross, thirty kilos of cross dragged with difficulty (the overloaded wheels obviously exploded at the first bump) from lodging to lodging in the terrifyingly steep streets of Istanbul. . . I wanted to present the image of an adventurer, an explorer. . . I was nothing but a mama’s boy overloaded with diarrhea medicine, buttons, and sewing thread just in case.
Sarah is much more at ease traveling around the Middle East; that’s something that enamors Franz; when they’re in Syria,
I listened to Sarah speak Syrian with the headwaiter and with the Aleppo ladies at the table next to us, and I was lucky, it seemed to me, to have entered this bubble, this magic circle of her presence which would become my daily life since it was absolutely clear to me, after the night in Tadmor that we had become—what? A couple? Lovers?
Franz is committing an error here that will lead him to disappointment. He hasn’t solidified any aspect of their relationship.
The night in Tadmor he’s referring to is a night when they shared a tent out in the desert.
Two blankets underneath, two on top, that was our bed; Sarah had rolled up into a ball against me, her back against my stomach. She had kindly asked if that bothered me: I had tried not to let my enthusiasm show through, of course not, not at all, and I bless nomadic life—her hair smelled of amber and wood fire; I didn’t dare move, from fear of disturbing her breathing, whose rhythm overwhelmed me; I tried to breathe like her, adagio at first, then largo; next to my chest I had the long curve of her back, barred by her bra, whose hooks I could feel against my folded arms. . . I had to try not to think too much about this proximity, which was of course impossible: an immense desire, which I managed to stifle, consumed me despite everything, in silence.
He has a chance to kiss her the next morning, but of course, he doesn’t,
if I had dared kiss Sarah that morning instead of turning over like a coward everything might have been different; sometimes a kiss changes an entire life, fate changes courses, bends, makes a detour.
But Franz is a coward; if you read enough Énard, you realize that’s the worst sin a man can commit: cowardice.
And it’s not about fucking bravery in battle or whatever; bravery is about saying the thing when you know you should, doing the thing; it’s about stepping up as a human being.
That’s Franz’s night in purgatory; he’s purging his cowardice.
THE REASON HE’S THINKING of Sarah so much is that she sent him an email.
They haven’t talked in a while and she sent him an article she wrote about “The Wine of the Dead in Sarawak”, a wine they make with corpses in a part of Malaysia.
Franz is spooked, but also he imagines Sarah there,
half-naked in a room in Sarawak, scantily clad in a tank top and cotton shorts; a little sweat between her shoulder blades and in the hollows of her knees, a bunched-up sheet, pushed down, reaching halfway up her calves. Some insects are still clinging to the mosquito net, drawn by the pulsing of the sleeper’s blood, despite the sun that’s already piercing through the trees.
He hits her back; they’re in opposite time zones, but it’s perfect because he’s up, and they begin an exchange while he thinks thru his mistakes with her and all the doomed lovers,
But have you read Tristram and Iseult, Vis and Ramin, Layla and Majnum, there are forces to be conquered, and life is very long, sometimes, life is very long as long as the shadow over Aleppo, the shadow of destruction.
FRANZ & SARAH ARE THE ROMANTIC core of the book, so that’s what I’m focusing on.
This novel has a lot of ideas about a lot of different things: it is erudite. And Énard’s knowledge is never wikipediafied; like these ain’t facts as ornament: all the ideas are lived-in, and resonate & echo with the story & structure of the book.
But that’s the kinda shit that can scare people away!
I think people avoid some of these ~challenging books~ because they’re scared to not understand everything.
I don’t fucking understand everything when I read this shit. But that’s a good thing!
If you’re reading a book you can 100% fully understand. . . maybe that ain’t really doing anything for you. . .
But I think you can see that Compass at its heart, is a warm, beautiful love story filled with exquisite writing.
FRANZ & SARAH ARE IN TEHRAN.
They all get drunk and a lecherous professor of Sarah’s tells them a wonderful, unbelievable story about a love affair he had during the Iranian revolution.
They take a cab home together and she makes the move (of course she does!),
it was she who held my fingers tight in hers, and drew my hand toward her—and didn’t let it go, not even when we arrived at our destination, not even, hours later, when the red dawn set fire to Mount Damavand and invaded my bedroom and lit up, in the midst of the sheets crisscrossed with flesh, her face made pale from fatigue, her infinitely naked back where there lazed, rocked by the waves of her breath, the long dragon of vertebrae and the traces of its fire, those freckles that flowed up to the back of her neck, like so many stars whose fire has been quenched, the galaxy that I journeyed across with my finger outlining imaginary voyages while Sarah, from the other side of her body, clutched my left hand below her breasts. . . She caressed me, I caressed her, and nothing in us sought to reassure ourselves with the word “love” so deep were we in the murkiest beauty of love, which is absolute presence next to the other in the other. . .
That’s the thesis of the book: love is the absolute presence next to the other in the other.
BUT UNFORTUNATELY: TRAGEDY,
Her mother had called her without success all evening and into the morning, desperate, had contacted the Institute, the consulate, moved heaven and earth and finally, when Sarah, throwing me a kiss from afar, had modestly closed the bathroom door for privacy, they had come to inform me
Sarah’s brother is dead, back in Paris.
She endures a bureaucratic nightmare to get out of Iran and their love-affair is over before it began.
BUT WHERE DO WE END?
Near daybreak, the emails start getting more frequent back & forth, Sarah sends him,
the last time I went to Vienna, I agreed to stay in that luxury hotel they had offered me, remember? Instead of sleeping at your place? That had made you terribly angry. I think it was in the secret, slightly childlike hope that you’d accompany me there, that we’d resume, in a beautiful unknown room, what we had begun in Tehran.
All of a sudden, I pine for you,
How beautiful Vienna is,
How far away Vienna is,
And as the sun comes up, Franz reaches the earthly paradise on the top of Mount Purgatory, he’s purged,
you’re surprised by the marble of the World veined with suffering and love, at daybreak, go on, there is no shame, there hasn’t been any shame in a long time, it is not shameful to copy out this winter song, not shameful to let yourself give in to your feelings
I close my eyes,
My heart still beats fervently.
When will the leaves at the window turn green again?
When will I hold my love in my arms?
and to the warm sunlight of hope.
Franz is changed.
He might get his love.
3. THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS’ GUILD (2020), (TR. FRANK WYNNE, 2023)
DAVID MAZON IS IN PARADISE.
But he don’t know it yet.
He’s an anthropologist doing field work in a little village in France outside Niort (where Énard grew up) called La Pierre-Saint-Christophe,
The demonym, according to Wikipedia and the mayoral website, is Petrochristophorian. Esteemed Petrochristophorians, ladies and gentleman, I have decided (Questions chapter) to conduct about a hundred interviews from among your number, choosing interviewees such that, by the end, I will have equal numbers for each gender and age bracket. That seems to me, empirically, a good idea. A year’s worth of work subdivided into two six-month campaigns. Great. I feel full of energy. . . Evidently, working in the countryside suits me.
The first part of the book is David Mazon’s diary. This is the easiest reading in all of Énard.
David is his most overtly comic character. Talk about bumbling! This dude is a fish completely out of his water; he is a Parisian thru & thru and cannot adapt to country life,
15 December
Woke up having caught a cold. Sub-zero temperatures in the bedroom, must remember to ask for an extra heater. The worm colony in the bathroom is thriving (eurgh), as are the dwarf snails in the living room—are the two things linked? Hurried breakfast. Prepared my questionnaire, checked the digital recorder. Quick hello to Lara on messenger. . .
Lara is his city girlfriend and it’s not going too well,
Late night. Lonely. Carnal thoughts. Lara everywhere. I wonder whether we should give up the webcam and move on to truly postmodern sexuality. I find the idea of wanking in front of computer screen faintly repellant. Never mind, just have to hold out for eight more days, it’s not big deal.
DAVID, THE URBANITE, DON’T THINK these Petrochristophorians got anything to offer; he’s interviewing them perfunctorily: he loves the idea of being out in the field, but he has no affinity for these people.
The mayor all excitedly tells him about the oldest man in the village, wanting David to go talk to him, “before it’s too late”,
Apparently, he is a very elderly gentleman. The mayor was so excited by the idea that I hadn’t the heart to tell him I’m not a folklorist, and I’ve no particular desire to meet old codgers, but anyway.
The old codger has a granddaughter, Lucie, about David’s age, who’s a farmer, and who David would prefer to interview so he can stare at her cleavage, and she tells him to come over for the interview, but when he gets there, she leaves.
Leaving him to babysit the old man and Lucie’s cousin Arnaud, an autistic dude who everyone in town loves, and who if you tell him a date, can tell you everything that happened on that date,
He was gawping at me, seemingly waiting for something to happen, so I got up from the chair and held out my hand, he stared at it as though he had no idea what to do with it. Today is 20 December, the feasts of Saints Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, birthdate of so-and-so, birthdate of Whats-his-name, world events various and diverse, which prompted a bestial laugh from the human wreck in the armchair, the grandfather was literally doubled with laughter in his chair, yelping and squealing — it felt like being in an asylum.
Eventually David sits for a three hour interview with the grandpa, but thinks it’s absolutely incomprehensible and lacking any interesting information.
DAVID’S FIRST SECTION ENDS WITH him almost giving up on the whole thing,
13 January
I have to admit I’m bored shitless. It’s Friday, and I’m thinking about taking the train back to Paris, but I don’t want to admit defeat just yet, and besides I’ve got appointments this weekend. It’s been raining the whole week, there are frozen pizza boxes strewn outside the Savage mind [what he calls his little room] and the place is starting to stink of cat piss. Jesus Christ, David, get a grip!
THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED similar to The Savage Detectives it’s book-ended by David’s journal entry, but in the big middle portion, we’re out at sea.
Here’s how the second part begins (after a two page interlude which Énard calls songs, little folk stories that frame the chapters to come),
Two years earlier, when the wild boar, the vessel for the soul of Father Largeau was born, at the very moment when the noble beast mewled against the pink teats of its mother in a cleft between two roots, in the mossy hollow of an oak, minutes after the old priest had peacefully breathed his last, his heart stilled, Mathilde discovered the body empty of its soul, she wept hot tears, she knelt before him, took his hand, realized that he was dead, and she prayed.
Now we’re in this roving third person that believes in the transmigration of souls, not in death, but in reincarnation.
We’re set up with David’s perspective to look at this backwater like he does; ain’t nothing worthwhile here; but now, using past lives as a formal device,
—and it seems like the only requirement for reincarnation is that your soul stays in the same geographical area,
—Énard can explore how absolutely rich with history and experience this podunk town is, because, as the epigraph to the book says,
‘In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird, and mammal’
—Thich Nhat Hanh (quoting the Buddha)
WE SEE LUCIE’S GRANDPA being a creep,
the grandfather in his armchair listening to the radio took pleasure in watching the nightdress, the bare legs and the underwear flash past: reflexively, he gripped his penis through his trousers, two fingers held what was no more now than a length of life-less flesh, the way it might hold a piece of bacon; Lucie sensed (or thought she sensed) the old man’s concupiscence and flushed with anger; she locked the bathroom door, since the old man sometimes shuffled over and spied on her.
But soon we realize that Gramps got an unbelievable family story that David Mazon overlooked,
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, until his arm ached, before drinking himself into a stupor and sobbing, alone, since he believed this shame would forever exile him from the company of men.
(This story is threaded brilliantly thru-out the whole third person section; Énard is the master of weaving these threads.)
Eventually the mother is forced into marrying this dude, Jérémie. And together they bought the house where Lucie, Arnaud, and her grandfather still live.
But Jérémie wasn’t thrilled about raising a bastard kid,
Jérémie was eager to prove his manhood, to ease the wounded pride that, despite this money, still burned within him; he regularly mounted his female, hoping, by an agonizing birth, to erase all trace of the previous membrum virile. He labored at this task a year, then two, but in vain. He brutally beat his wife, convinced that her unwillingness was to blame, then abruptly changed his strategy, stopped beating her, relieved her of all manual labor, all the while redoubling his passion, but to no avail.
Eventually he goes off to World War 2, and his wife fakes a pregnancy. Sends him staged photos, the whole works.
But when he’s about to come home, she tells him that she had a miscarriage, but everybody in town knows the truth, and when he comes back, he looks like a fool; he goes completely insane and ends up. . . after quite a rigamarole that I won’t spoil. . . hanging himself,
When Lucie’s grandfather, at thirteen, found his father hanging from a joist in the barn, eyes rolled back, neck snapped, face slightly blue, arms rigid and fingers splayed, he stood in the doorway, frozen with grief and terror, unable to scream, unable to tear his eyes from the levitating corpse but without noticing something that would later amuse the gendarmes and gravediggers, the hole in his grandfather’s left sock through which a fat, accusatory toe pointed at the door, at least a meter above the clogs that had fallen onto the straw.
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE GRAVEDIGGERS.
The title of the book is taken from a chapter that contains Énard’s most insane & indulgent (I mean that positively) digression in any of his books.
So for three days every year, Death ceases, and the gravediggers from around the world gather for an outrageous ridiculous feast.
This is Énard doing Rabelais; the abbey in Gargantua & Pantagruel is near La Pierre-Saint-Cristophe.
One of the gravediggers tells a story about Gargantua, to give you an idea of how this section goes,
Here it was Gargantua was born! Upon this self-same spot! Born fully formed, primed and ready. Now suppose this brave giant knew not where to stick it, where, in what vessel and by what excipient: for it was so big that no cunt could contain it. A nanny-goat was tried: she ended up a harelip, cleaved in twain and inside out, her horns on her arse and her fleece in her guts. A cow was prepared for this Homeric member. The problem, the pressure, as all will remember: though roped by her shanks and with steel round her flanks, she exploded. . . And beware the emission! The cannon fired thunderous salvos wildly, it rained homunculi! All Poitou was knee deep in cream that patissiers piped into éclairs. The semen delighted the fisherman, for in it were oyster pearls and caviar.
NOW I CAN SEE SOME SCOWLS & COMPLAINTS: the age old cry: this guy needs an editor!!
You’re the same cohort complaining bout the myopic scantiness of contemporary literature.
Here is a dude reveling in the point of literature: PLAY.
Great literature is a game, folks! It is Art for Art’s sake.
And guess, what? In every single one of his books, Énard is overtly, insistently political. How can you reconcile those tendencies?
Because the disposition that sees the world as a place of insistent amusement & wonder is the same disposition that cares deeply about the fate & health of that world.
Politics in art ain’t Marx this, Marx that; it’s form, attitude, vision.
BY THE TIME WE GET BACK to David Mazon’s journal, he’s changed.
It’s months later (the last entry in the first part is FEB 5 and now we’re in OCT 17.
And it’s like he imbued all the stories from the middle part of the book; that’s a sign of great literature, when everything in the book is infected by what’s happening: think of the storm in King Lear making everyone tempestuous.
David Mazon has decided to ditch his thesis, ditch his Paris girlfriend. He is now with Lucie, farming and participating in lowkey eco-terrorism,
it took a few months before I finally abandoned my thesis, enough time for all things to ripen, the vegetables and my desires for the future. I won’t say that it was an easy decision, it’s never easy to change your life, but it is always possible.
Like Dante, he sees into the essence of things and it changes him.
Him and Lucie ride off into the sunset together in his beat up car,
Lucie climbed into the passenger seat and, despite the screwdriver, the window slid down ten centimeters as she slammed the door.
I waved to Gary, blew Mathilde a kiss.
‘Come on, we don’t have our whole lives,” said Lucie.
‘Well, actually, we do,’ I said.
I started the engine, put the car into first gear, and we set off to save the planet.
. . . the love that moves the sun and the other stars & all that. . .
My tiny liberal arts college library somehow got an early edition of Zone back in like 2007-8 and for some reason I picked it up and started reading it when it showed up in the new fiction section...I didn't put it down for a week until I finished it. Holy fuck what an experience.
I still remember it all these years later. Magisterial.
thanks for this