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Zone
Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.
Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .
One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.
Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .
One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.
Paperback
First published August 15, 2008
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About the author
Mathias Énard
38books461followersMathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée-de-La-Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.
Compass, which garnered Énard the renowned Prix Goncourt in 2015, traces the intimate connection between Western humanities and art history, and Islamic philosophy and culture. In one sentence that's over 500 pages long, Zone tells of the recent European past as a cascade of consequences of wars and conflicts.
Énard lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the Universitat Autònoma. His latest publications include a poetry collection titled Dernière communication à la société proustienne de Barcelone (Final message to the Proust Society of Barcelona) and Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, a long novel published in 2020.
Compass, which garnered Énard the renowned Prix Goncourt in 2015, traces the intimate connection between Western humanities and art history, and Islamic philosophy and culture. In one sentence that's over 500 pages long, Zone tells of the recent European past as a cascade of consequences of wars and conflicts.
Énard lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the Universitat Autònoma. His latest publications include a poetry collection titled Dernière communication à la société proustienne de Barcelone (Final message to the Proust Society of Barcelona) and Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, a long novel published in 2020.
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June 21, 2024
Since the time of Troy the Mediterranean Basin, which Mathias Énard simply calls Zone, has been being torn apart and racked with wars and atrocious historical cataclysms. And his novel, heavy with the references and allusions to , is a history of violence in the area told in the single, excruciatingly dark sentence.
The protagonist, who secretly identifies himself with Achilles, is a petty spy, a soldier in the army of shadows, a Trojan Horse rider going from Milan to Rome in the train, recollecting his life, contemplating brutality of mankind and trying to flee from his murky past.
When masters fall out, their men get the clout� When titans collide, that is mice that get crushed� And devastation is irreversible.
We sleep calmly seeing sweet dreams but somewhere it’s war: the innocents are dying, happiness is annihilated, homes lie in ruins� There is always war somewhere near�
…I had forgotten that I was a pawn like any other in the quarrels of Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Pallas Athena, a pawn used for carrying out an aim as obscure as the clouds amassed over inaccessible Olympus, that’s one way to console yourself, I could also say OK I was fooled deceived manipulated used, nothing else�
The protagonist, who secretly identifies himself with Achilles, is a petty spy, a soldier in the army of shadows, a Trojan Horse rider going from Milan to Rome in the train, recollecting his life, contemplating brutality of mankind and trying to flee from his murky past.
…ogres want everything, take everything, eat everything, power, money, weapons, and females, in that order, and these stories of monsters reminded me of my own ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench all their thirst for mythic humanity, violence and desire, these stories were the delights of the man in the street, the children, the meek, happy to see the powerful get humiliated in turn in front of someone more powerful, lose their honor their wives as the poor had lost their houses their children or their legs in a bombardment, which after all seemed less serious than dishonor and humiliation, the defeat of the powerful is tremendous, beautiful and loud, a hero always makes noise when he collapses, a hundred kilos of muscle strike the ground in one huge dull thud, the public is on its feet to see Hector tied to the chariot, see his head wobble and his blood spurt, the ogre conquered by an even bigger ogre�
When masters fall out, their men get the clout� When titans collide, that is mice that get crushed� And devastation is irreversible.
…nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains�
We sleep calmly seeing sweet dreams but somewhere it’s war: the innocents are dying, happiness is annihilated, homes lie in ruins� There is always war somewhere near�
January 8, 2022
“we all tell the same story, at bottom, a tale of violence and desire�
Mathias Énard’s Zone is at the height of literary brilliancy and the best modern novel I’ve read so far. The novel is written in one long, propulsive, dark sentence, the main character’s stream of consciousness with a fragmented, non-linear narrative that has nested stories within. But this Énard's one sentence does not serve as a mere demonstration of artistry and narrative virtuosity, nor does it make reading difficult or confusing. In uncommon erudition, divided into 24 chapters to mirror , Énard has tempo, the palpitating rhythm of writing that draws you in, hypnotically occupies your attention and consciousness, leaving you hungry for more. Énard writes with passion, dedication, emotion and meaning, all things that can be lacking in the genre of modern literary fiction. I am not surprised that Zone won several major prizes, including the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Décembre and the Prix Initiales.
The topics Énard tackled in the Zone are incredibly complex and sensitive, and he did it magnificently and profoundly, balancing rawness of violence with tragicomic approach, the excruciating pain of historical cataclysms with brilliant criticisms of nationalism, war, and humanity at whole. Commenting on the Haag court he says;
“characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate de jure and at what instant it constituted a grave breach of the law and customs of war�
The history of violence
The main character Francis Servain Mirković is French-born Croat, a mad erudite and tired spy for French intelligence service specialized in the Zone - the lands of the Mediterranean Basin. He carries in suitcase secret information he gathered over the years. With the suitcase, he is traveling by train from Rome to Milan, and the journey evokes ruminations about the collective and personal brutality and confronts him with the ghost of the past that haunt him and the whole Mediterranean. In long reflections, he is creating the modern Iliad, the tractate of a secret history of European atrocities.
Francis reflects on his heritage; his Croatian mother that had a father who was Ustasha, the close collaborator to Pavelić and Maks Luburić, the butcher of Jasenovac.
“my mother...she received the energy from those proud soldiers to transmit to her son an inflexible, fierce history, a share of Fate like a burden on my shoulders, everything connects, everything connects...�
On the other hand, his father is French, with a father that was part of the Resistance, tortured by the Gestapo. Even though Francis's grandfather was in the Resistance to the nazi regime, his father becomes the torturer and murderer of Algerians.
“father son of a Resistant participated actively in the resolution to the Algerian problem, submachine gun in hand, ... a torturer despite himself, a rapist too probably despite himself, executioner despite himself..."
Francis himself fought in the Croatian War of Independence on fronts from Slavonia to Bosnia. The protagonist is obsessed with politics and history, the war is under his skin, and he ultimately crumbles under the weight of violence of his grandfather, his father, and his war crimes. He feels the weight of his destiny, as has a sense of predetermination in family history to continue the acts of violence.
“the son followed the shadow of the father, the grandfather and many others without realizing it, as I bury my progenitor I think of the dead who are accompanying him into the grave, tortured, raped, killed unarmed or fallen in combat, they flit about in the Ivry cemetery, around us, can my mother see them, does she know, of course, he did what he had to do, that’s her phrase, like mine I did what had to be done, for the homeland, for Bog our God for the cemeteries who call out�
He is torn apart by the never endless cycle of brutality and war present in his family and throughout history, and gives sharp commentary on how each generation is affected by the different destructive forces. From the time of the Trojan War to the present day the gods of war have never left the Zone, again and again creating irreversible devastation.
“how much I too would have liked to decide, to have been offered Achilles’s choice, instead of letting myself be carried into the darkness from cellar to cellar, from shelter to shelter, from zone to zone...�
Hate is contagious
“what do the reasons for killing matter they’re all good reasons in war�
Francis meditates on the origin of hate and nationalism. Francis is some sort of fascist, but his fascism is inconsistent, temporary, and partial as he is self-observant and bluntly honest about the absurdity often present in politics that forms hate. Why would a very well-read and educated Frenchman, agree to die for Croatia in 1991? According to Servain Mirković, for two types of reasons: one concerns bare ideology, the other family mythology.
“that great Célineian pragmatism of the 1930s� 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution, every question an answer, to each his own devil, the Jews the Serbs the communists the fascists the Freemasons the saboteurs and everyone sought to resolve his problem in a definitive way with the help of some group or other�
Painfully honest in his observations, he shares how the seed of revenge is planted in the hearts of ordinary men, conditioning them to commit the unspeakable deeds.
“whether it was used by one side or the other didn’t take away any of the veracity from the testimony, attested by the force of the revenge, the hatred of whoever espouses that revenge, hatred he will purge, dozens of years later, using it against his enemies, out of fear, fear stemming from tradition, from the legend that impels him too to go towards the other with his blade leading the way, the way the stories of Serbian atrocities drove us, in fear, to cut their corpses up into pieces, terrified no doubt that such warriors had the power to come back to life, the series of Serbo-Croatian massacres always proved the previous story right, without any one ever being wrong, since everyone, like the Austrians in Serbia, could cite an atrocity committed by the other camp, the Other per se, you had to erase his humanity by tearing off his face, prevent him from procreating by cutting off his balls, contaminate him by raping his women, annihilate his descendants by slicing off breasts and pubic hair, return to zero, annul fear and suffering, history is a tale of fierce animals, a book with wolves on every page...�
Francis with characteristics of a cold psychopath carefully describes the experience of slaughtering and torturing men, raping women, and setting villages on fire. But he is also depressed and exhausted as the striking madness of the modern world he cannot escape is gathered in his imagination.
“fates driven by hatred and war, it’s hard to understand hatred when you haven’t experienced it or when you’ve forgotten the burning violence the rage that lifts your arm against an enemy his wife his child wanting revenge wanting pain for them make them suffer too, destroy their houses disinter their dead with mortar shells plant our semen in their females and our bayonets in their eyes shower them with insults and kicks because I myself had cried when I saw the solitary body of a beheaded kid clutching a toy in a ditch, a grandmother disemboweled with a crucifix, a comrade tortured enucleated grilled in gas like a shriveled-up grasshopper, his eyesockets empty and white, almost gleaming in the carbonized mass of the corpse, images that still today set my heart beating faster, make my fists clench, ten years later�
In the heart of hatred is fear, a psychosis, a collective paranoia that perpetuates the eternal cycle of violence, with each act of brutality adding the gasoline of revenge on the flames of madness.
The greater powers are always in work to create hate and war, and hate and war further corrupt the heart of men, casting a long shadow on their life, changing them irreversibly.
“what we had seen in Slavonia stretched out, augmented, resounded endlessly, in a duel of violent acts and savageries on this one or that one, Serb or Croat or Muslim, according to all possible combinations of horror, the Russians and Greeks next to the Serbs Arabs and Turks next to the Muslims Catholic Europeans next to Croats bastions of the West all these lovely people hated each other, Andi had said to me you’ll see, you’ll hate the Serbs and Muslims sooner or later, I was surprised, the Serbs maybe, but the Muslims, and Andi had been right, I had a burning hatred in my chest, instilled there by Eris the indefatigable goddess of Strife, which took a long time to calm down�
War has no winners
“Sometimes weapons turn against you. You always end up washing corpses.�
Each war comes with unimaginable destruction of the great number of human lives, on each side. Some of the voices are buried immediately in physical torture and death, and some voices carry on to tell us the stories of war, physically alive, but often with dead souls, the shells of people they once were, forever fixed in the state of trauma they survived, unable to ever really continue life.
“the profession of solitude despite the contact of bodies despite Sashka’s caresses I feel as if I’m unreachable as if I’m already gone already far away locked up in the bottom of my briefcase full of torturers and the dead with no hope of ever emerging into the light of day, my skin insensitive to the sun will remain forever white, smooth as the marble gravestones in Vukovar�
Working with the veterans of war I heard numerous stories in one way or another similar to Francis’s, and Enard perfectly replicated emotions they are told with. He replicated the sorrow, the regret, guilt, despair, bleakness, depression, the feelings of the unconnectedness and disappointment they feel towards their country. Enard created an incredibly vivid picture of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I was having my first nightmares, I heard bombs all night long, I saw over and over again the Serb soldier exploding on top of the T55 turret, so precisely that I could have drawn his frozen face, paralyzed with terror before the rocket rushing towards him to propel him into death, all those faces are superimposed on each other now, the terrified the decapitated the burned the bullet-pierced eaten by dogs or foxes the amputated the broken the calm the tortured the hanged the gassed, mine and others� the photographs and memories the heads without bodies the arms without bodies the dead eyes they all have the same features, it’s all of humanity one icon the same face the same sensation of pressure in your eardrums the same long tunnel where you can’t breathe, an infinite train a long march of the guilty of victims of terror and revenge, an immense fresco in the Church of No One�
Zone is a book about collective and individual trauma, the way trauma bleeds its way up and down between the individual and the larger collective groups to which he belongs. Through war, it is hard to be confronted with the evil in oneself and your own nation, the nation that you had to idealize in order to risk your life and so much more in a fight. In the novel, Francis wants to in a way give up his Croatian identity, all that he inherited from his mother and grandfather, as he wants to rest from the heritage of war.
“my uniforms I made a big ball of them that I burned in the shower after soaking it in cooking rum, everything, including the badges: I kept only the dagger, its sheath, and a few plastic crucifixes, knickknacks that they handed out to us by the handful like the keys to paradise that were given to the Iranian volunteers under Khomeini, a reality had to be given to the barbarity that was the beginning of a new life the cloth burned with a thick smoke smelling of crêpes, you don’t escape your homeland, I was flambéing my homeland with rum along with my soldier’s gear�
“I looked at the checkerboard patch sewn in haste onto Andi’s shoulder to give me courage, at least we knew what we were fighting for, for a country for a surrounded city for liberty and 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�
Énard’s Zone made me reminiscent of Tolstoy’s work in . The macroscopic view of history found in the textbooks contains a completely different narrative of the microscopic, individual history told by eyewitnesses, the people who endured tragic historical events. Énard, much in the vein of , uses personal stories to give a precise critique of war, and show its true colors, exposing the truth that is hidden in the illusion of nationalism, making this the most powerful novel written about the wars of the Balkans yet. Enard did his research and with his literary brilliancy replicated real-life. Francis is a haunted soul, dependent on alcohol and drugs, unable of holding a relationship with a woman. Looking in the eyes of many other veteran men, sometimes physically ill with cancer or other chronic diseases, sometimes depended on alcohol, or drugs, or more than 10 psychiatric medications to get through the day, in the sorrow of the eyes who seen horrors it is hard to find a pride of victory. War has no winners, and it leaves only ruin and trauma present for the decades even after the conflict resolves, the destruction of the body, of the psyche, of morality and spirit, of family, the safety of home, marriages, of integrity, of humanity. It is a thief of youth and innocence, robbing the whole generation of people of completely different lives they could have lived in peace.
“where were they, Andrija the Slavonic, Vlaho the Dalmatian, lost in death or in their mountains, sing, goddess, their memorable names, the names of the ones who left me, whom I left, for the first time I felt as if I were locked up in the Zone, in a hazy shifting blue interspace where a long threnody rose up chanted by an ancient choir, and everything was spinning around me because I was a ghost locked up in the realm of the Dead, condemned to wander without ever making an image on photographic film or being reflected in a mirror until I shattered my fate, but how, how could I extricate myself from this empty shell that was my body�
Énard is not hopeful nor optimistic. The destructive forces of brutality, the Gods of war, will never be at peace at the Zone.
Who can ever stop the vicious never-ending cycle?
“we’re all attached to each other by indissoluble ties of heroic blood, by the intrigues of our jealous gods�
Recommended soundtrack:
Mathias Énard’s Zone is at the height of literary brilliancy and the best modern novel I’ve read so far. The novel is written in one long, propulsive, dark sentence, the main character’s stream of consciousness with a fragmented, non-linear narrative that has nested stories within. But this Énard's one sentence does not serve as a mere demonstration of artistry and narrative virtuosity, nor does it make reading difficult or confusing. In uncommon erudition, divided into 24 chapters to mirror , Énard has tempo, the palpitating rhythm of writing that draws you in, hypnotically occupies your attention and consciousness, leaving you hungry for more. Énard writes with passion, dedication, emotion and meaning, all things that can be lacking in the genre of modern literary fiction. I am not surprised that Zone won several major prizes, including the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Décembre and the Prix Initiales.
The topics Énard tackled in the Zone are incredibly complex and sensitive, and he did it magnificently and profoundly, balancing rawness of violence with tragicomic approach, the excruciating pain of historical cataclysms with brilliant criticisms of nationalism, war, and humanity at whole. Commenting on the Haag court he says;
“characters in the Great Trial organized by international lawyers immersed in precedents and the jurisprudence of horror, charged with putting some order into the law of murder, with knowing at what instant a bullet in the head was legitimate de jure and at what instant it constituted a grave breach of the law and customs of war�
The history of violence
The main character Francis Servain Mirković is French-born Croat, a mad erudite and tired spy for French intelligence service specialized in the Zone - the lands of the Mediterranean Basin. He carries in suitcase secret information he gathered over the years. With the suitcase, he is traveling by train from Rome to Milan, and the journey evokes ruminations about the collective and personal brutality and confronts him with the ghost of the past that haunt him and the whole Mediterranean. In long reflections, he is creating the modern Iliad, the tractate of a secret history of European atrocities.
Francis reflects on his heritage; his Croatian mother that had a father who was Ustasha, the close collaborator to Pavelić and Maks Luburić, the butcher of Jasenovac.
“my mother...she received the energy from those proud soldiers to transmit to her son an inflexible, fierce history, a share of Fate like a burden on my shoulders, everything connects, everything connects...�
On the other hand, his father is French, with a father that was part of the Resistance, tortured by the Gestapo. Even though Francis's grandfather was in the Resistance to the nazi regime, his father becomes the torturer and murderer of Algerians.
“father son of a Resistant participated actively in the resolution to the Algerian problem, submachine gun in hand, ... a torturer despite himself, a rapist too probably despite himself, executioner despite himself..."
Francis himself fought in the Croatian War of Independence on fronts from Slavonia to Bosnia. The protagonist is obsessed with politics and history, the war is under his skin, and he ultimately crumbles under the weight of violence of his grandfather, his father, and his war crimes. He feels the weight of his destiny, as has a sense of predetermination in family history to continue the acts of violence.
“the son followed the shadow of the father, the grandfather and many others without realizing it, as I bury my progenitor I think of the dead who are accompanying him into the grave, tortured, raped, killed unarmed or fallen in combat, they flit about in the Ivry cemetery, around us, can my mother see them, does she know, of course, he did what he had to do, that’s her phrase, like mine I did what had to be done, for the homeland, for Bog our God for the cemeteries who call out�
He is torn apart by the never endless cycle of brutality and war present in his family and throughout history, and gives sharp commentary on how each generation is affected by the different destructive forces. From the time of the Trojan War to the present day the gods of war have never left the Zone, again and again creating irreversible devastation.
“how much I too would have liked to decide, to have been offered Achilles’s choice, instead of letting myself be carried into the darkness from cellar to cellar, from shelter to shelter, from zone to zone...�
Hate is contagious
“what do the reasons for killing matter they’re all good reasons in war�
Francis meditates on the origin of hate and nationalism. Francis is some sort of fascist, but his fascism is inconsistent, temporary, and partial as he is self-observant and bluntly honest about the absurdity often present in politics that forms hate. Why would a very well-read and educated Frenchman, agree to die for Croatia in 1991? According to Servain Mirković, for two types of reasons: one concerns bare ideology, the other family mythology.
“that great Célineian pragmatism of the 1930s� 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution, every question an answer, to each his own devil, the Jews the Serbs the communists the fascists the Freemasons the saboteurs and everyone sought to resolve his problem in a definitive way with the help of some group or other�
Painfully honest in his observations, he shares how the seed of revenge is planted in the hearts of ordinary men, conditioning them to commit the unspeakable deeds.
“whether it was used by one side or the other didn’t take away any of the veracity from the testimony, attested by the force of the revenge, the hatred of whoever espouses that revenge, hatred he will purge, dozens of years later, using it against his enemies, out of fear, fear stemming from tradition, from the legend that impels him too to go towards the other with his blade leading the way, the way the stories of Serbian atrocities drove us, in fear, to cut their corpses up into pieces, terrified no doubt that such warriors had the power to come back to life, the series of Serbo-Croatian massacres always proved the previous story right, without any one ever being wrong, since everyone, like the Austrians in Serbia, could cite an atrocity committed by the other camp, the Other per se, you had to erase his humanity by tearing off his face, prevent him from procreating by cutting off his balls, contaminate him by raping his women, annihilate his descendants by slicing off breasts and pubic hair, return to zero, annul fear and suffering, history is a tale of fierce animals, a book with wolves on every page...�
Francis with characteristics of a cold psychopath carefully describes the experience of slaughtering and torturing men, raping women, and setting villages on fire. But he is also depressed and exhausted as the striking madness of the modern world he cannot escape is gathered in his imagination.
“fates driven by hatred and war, it’s hard to understand hatred when you haven’t experienced it or when you’ve forgotten the burning violence the rage that lifts your arm against an enemy his wife his child wanting revenge wanting pain for them make them suffer too, destroy their houses disinter their dead with mortar shells plant our semen in their females and our bayonets in their eyes shower them with insults and kicks because I myself had cried when I saw the solitary body of a beheaded kid clutching a toy in a ditch, a grandmother disemboweled with a crucifix, a comrade tortured enucleated grilled in gas like a shriveled-up grasshopper, his eyesockets empty and white, almost gleaming in the carbonized mass of the corpse, images that still today set my heart beating faster, make my fists clench, ten years later�
In the heart of hatred is fear, a psychosis, a collective paranoia that perpetuates the eternal cycle of violence, with each act of brutality adding the gasoline of revenge on the flames of madness.
The greater powers are always in work to create hate and war, and hate and war further corrupt the heart of men, casting a long shadow on their life, changing them irreversibly.
“what we had seen in Slavonia stretched out, augmented, resounded endlessly, in a duel of violent acts and savageries on this one or that one, Serb or Croat or Muslim, according to all possible combinations of horror, the Russians and Greeks next to the Serbs Arabs and Turks next to the Muslims Catholic Europeans next to Croats bastions of the West all these lovely people hated each other, Andi had said to me you’ll see, you’ll hate the Serbs and Muslims sooner or later, I was surprised, the Serbs maybe, but the Muslims, and Andi had been right, I had a burning hatred in my chest, instilled there by Eris the indefatigable goddess of Strife, which took a long time to calm down�
War has no winners
“Sometimes weapons turn against you. You always end up washing corpses.�
Each war comes with unimaginable destruction of the great number of human lives, on each side. Some of the voices are buried immediately in physical torture and death, and some voices carry on to tell us the stories of war, physically alive, but often with dead souls, the shells of people they once were, forever fixed in the state of trauma they survived, unable to ever really continue life.
“the profession of solitude despite the contact of bodies despite Sashka’s caresses I feel as if I’m unreachable as if I’m already gone already far away locked up in the bottom of my briefcase full of torturers and the dead with no hope of ever emerging into the light of day, my skin insensitive to the sun will remain forever white, smooth as the marble gravestones in Vukovar�
Working with the veterans of war I heard numerous stories in one way or another similar to Francis’s, and Enard perfectly replicated emotions they are told with. He replicated the sorrow, the regret, guilt, despair, bleakness, depression, the feelings of the unconnectedness and disappointment they feel towards their country. Enard created an incredibly vivid picture of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I was having my first nightmares, I heard bombs all night long, I saw over and over again the Serb soldier exploding on top of the T55 turret, so precisely that I could have drawn his frozen face, paralyzed with terror before the rocket rushing towards him to propel him into death, all those faces are superimposed on each other now, the terrified the decapitated the burned the bullet-pierced eaten by dogs or foxes the amputated the broken the calm the tortured the hanged the gassed, mine and others� the photographs and memories the heads without bodies the arms without bodies the dead eyes they all have the same features, it’s all of humanity one icon the same face the same sensation of pressure in your eardrums the same long tunnel where you can’t breathe, an infinite train a long march of the guilty of victims of terror and revenge, an immense fresco in the Church of No One�
Zone is a book about collective and individual trauma, the way trauma bleeds its way up and down between the individual and the larger collective groups to which he belongs. Through war, it is hard to be confronted with the evil in oneself and your own nation, the nation that you had to idealize in order to risk your life and so much more in a fight. In the novel, Francis wants to in a way give up his Croatian identity, all that he inherited from his mother and grandfather, as he wants to rest from the heritage of war.
“my uniforms I made a big ball of them that I burned in the shower after soaking it in cooking rum, everything, including the badges: I kept only the dagger, its sheath, and a few plastic crucifixes, knickknacks that they handed out to us by the handful like the keys to paradise that were given to the Iranian volunteers under Khomeini, a reality had to be given to the barbarity that was the beginning of a new life the cloth burned with a thick smoke smelling of crêpes, you don’t escape your homeland, I was flambéing my homeland with rum along with my soldier’s gear�
“I looked at the checkerboard patch sewn in haste onto Andi’s shoulder to give me courage, at least we knew what we were fighting for, for a country for a surrounded city for liberty and 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�
Énard’s Zone made me reminiscent of Tolstoy’s work in . The macroscopic view of history found in the textbooks contains a completely different narrative of the microscopic, individual history told by eyewitnesses, the people who endured tragic historical events. Énard, much in the vein of , uses personal stories to give a precise critique of war, and show its true colors, exposing the truth that is hidden in the illusion of nationalism, making this the most powerful novel written about the wars of the Balkans yet. Enard did his research and with his literary brilliancy replicated real-life. Francis is a haunted soul, dependent on alcohol and drugs, unable of holding a relationship with a woman. Looking in the eyes of many other veteran men, sometimes physically ill with cancer or other chronic diseases, sometimes depended on alcohol, or drugs, or more than 10 psychiatric medications to get through the day, in the sorrow of the eyes who seen horrors it is hard to find a pride of victory. War has no winners, and it leaves only ruin and trauma present for the decades even after the conflict resolves, the destruction of the body, of the psyche, of morality and spirit, of family, the safety of home, marriages, of integrity, of humanity. It is a thief of youth and innocence, robbing the whole generation of people of completely different lives they could have lived in peace.
“where were they, Andrija the Slavonic, Vlaho the Dalmatian, lost in death or in their mountains, sing, goddess, their memorable names, the names of the ones who left me, whom I left, for the first time I felt as if I were locked up in the Zone, in a hazy shifting blue interspace where a long threnody rose up chanted by an ancient choir, and everything was spinning around me because I was a ghost locked up in the realm of the Dead, condemned to wander without ever making an image on photographic film or being reflected in a mirror until I shattered my fate, but how, how could I extricate myself from this empty shell that was my body�
Énard is not hopeful nor optimistic. The destructive forces of brutality, the Gods of war, will never be at peace at the Zone.
Who can ever stop the vicious never-ending cycle?
“we’re all attached to each other by indissoluble ties of heroic blood, by the intrigues of our jealous gods�
Recommended soundtrack:
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July 24, 2024
Rovinj, Croatia.
Zone - Mathias Énard's extraordinary 517-page novel written in one churning, horrifying gush of a sentence. Oh, yes, we spend the entire novel inside the head of seasoned spy Francis Servain Mirković, listening to his turbulent internal monologue, occasionally punctuated by nested stories, as he travels by train from Milan to Rome to sell information to the Vatican - a list of names and details from years of extreme violence in the Zone, that is, the Mediterranean region stretching all the way from Spain to Syria, with a particular focus on Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia, and his homeland of Croatia.
"you don't forget much in the end, the wrinkled hands of Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Batavian, his trembling mustache, the faces of Islamists tortured in the Qanatar Prison, the photograph of the severed heads of the Tibhirine monks, the reflections on the cupolas in Jerusalem, Marianne naked facing the sea, the squeals of Andrija's pig, the bodies piled up in the gas trucks of Chelmno, Stéphanie the sorrowful in front of Hagia Sophia, Sashka with her brushes and paints in Rome, my mother at the piano in Madrid, her Bach fugue in front of an audience of Croatian and Spanish patriots, so many images linked by an uninterrupted thread that snakes like a railroad bypassing a city..."
Mirković blends deeply personal experiences with bloody, tortured historical events, and intertwines them with literature and the arts. All of this floats freely in the spy's consciousness, expressed, as noted above, in one continuous sentence. And, as Stephen Burn pointed out in his New York Times review, Mathias Énard may be using the English word "sentence" not only as a grammatical construction but also as an act of judgment, akin to a jail sentence. In this case, the events taken as a totality within the novel pass judgment on 20th-century Western civilization, measured out in collective guilt and shame.
“I slept with Marianne, she got undressed in the bathroom, she had a body, a face to rend your soul and mine asked for nothing but that, in the scent of the Alexandrian rain and sea I got drunk on Marianne's fragrances...� Mirković speaks of a “search of a love, a gaze,� an event that will tear him from the endless circling, release him from the Wheel, “a meeting, anything to escape yourself.� At another point, he sees himself in orbit. “I have been split in two then in the war and crushed like a tiny meteor.�
There's a good bit of irony here. Mirković yearns for release from the wheel of Samsara, from the world of illusion. Having been split in two and crushed by war, suffering from PTSD that he attempts to drown out by continually plying himself with drugs and booze, he would dearly love to be made whole. But how? Does he expect his new life with a new woman, Sashka the artist, to be the answer? According to enlightenment traditions such as Buddhism, if he truly became serious about effecting a release from anxiety, craving, hatred, and delusion, he'd go off, either in isolation or as part of a spiritual community.
"curious this passion for reading, a remnant from Venice, from Marianne great devourer of books, a way to forget to disappear wholly into paper, little by little I replaced adventure novels with simple novels, Conrad's fault, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness, one title calls for another, and maybe without really understanding, who knows, I let myself be carried away, page by page...there is nothing I desire more than a novel, where the people and characters, a play of masks and desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the paragraphs, dialogues, adventures..."
Many are the references to writers and literature sprinkled throughout the novel's pages. We're even given hints that Mirković himself would like to tell his story in writing. For me, this was surely a most appealing and uplifting part of Zone. And when I read, “these stories of monsters reminded me of my own ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench all their thirst for mythic humanity,� I linked the narrator's vivid, hideous, dreadful images with three novels I've read and reviewed from the Eastern European Zone: Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić (Bosnia), Absolution by Aleš Šteger (Slovania), and A Handful of Sand by Marinko Košče (Croatia). The underlying message: war and violence are never the answer.
"for us the collective stems from the story of individual suffering, the place of the dead, of corpses, it's not Croatia that's bleeding it's the Croats, our country is where its graves are, our murderers, the murderers on the other side of the mirror are biding their time, and they will come, they will come because they have already come, because we have already gone to cut their ears to a point, put our stakes in their wives' stomachs and tear out their eyes, a great wave of screaming blind men will cry for revenge, will come defend their graves and the bones of their dead..."
Reading passages like this, is it any wonder Zone, like Homer's Illiad, is divided into 24 bloody chapters and we're given the sense Ares or Mars, the god of war, continues to reign havoc over the lands within the Zone. Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised that Mirković reflects, "I was no longer inside myself I was in the Bardo the waiting room of wandering souls." True, the narrator is on a train traveling in Odyssey mode rather than actively engaged in Illiad war mode, but, and this is a critical point, the corpse strewn fields still fill his mind - in a very real sense, he's the embodiment of the unending murders, tortures, and war within the Zone.
Mathias Énard has written a propulsive novel, once started, nearly impossible to put down. It is an erudite and ambitious literary work articulated in an unforgettable voice. Special thanks to Charlotte Mandell for her splendid translation.
Mathias Énard, born 1972 - photo taken around 2008, publication date of Zone, when the French author was 38-years-old
November 6, 2017
One last suitcase and I’ll join Sashka with the transparent gaze . . . no more lists no more torturers� victims investigations . . . I’m changing my life
Such recalls Umberto Eco's definition of a polymath, one that is interested in everything and nothing else. Enard's gripping novel punches this reader with the weight of nearly all recorded (recoded) history in its wake.
Such recalls Umberto Eco's definition of a polymath, one that is interested in everything and nothing else. Enard's gripping novel punches this reader with the weight of nearly all recorded (recoded) history in its wake.
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April 5, 2021The Limits of the Modernist Long Sentence
The reviews, pre-publication reviews, and endorsements of this novel all focused on the notion that it is a single long sentence. (For example Patrick Reardon in the Chicago Tribune, December 9, 2008, which was included in the publisher's press pack.)
But this book is not one sentence, for at least four reasons. Two of them are listed in an excellent short survey of long sentences by Tim Parks (New York Times, December 24, 2010, in the Book Review, p. 27):
1. The sentence is "compromised" by 23 chapter breaks.
2. Three of the chapters are excerpts from an imaginary book that the narrator in "Zone" is reading, and those three chapters are full of periods.
But there are two stronger reasons why "Zone" isn't a sentence:
3. Enard sometimes gives up commas, so that the prose becomes agrammatical. It's not a sentence if it is a string of sentence fragments.
4. He mixes tenses, doesn't observe parallel constructions, doesn't avoid run-on phrases, and doesn't make any attempt to structure his book according to subject, verb, and object: in other words, he only takes intermittent notice of the convention called the sentence.
Still, it's hard to see how any of this matters. By concentrating on the supposed single sentence, the publicity engine that drove readers to this book missed other more important points. (The same pattern repeated in 2019 with Lucy Ellmann's "Ducks, Newburyport," and Ellmann—I assume it was her—answered one of my comments on Twitter by saying it was one sentence "in spirit.")
First is the literary genealogy of the long sentence. It's a typically modernist strategy, most famously used by Joyce, Faulkner, and Beckett, intended to represent experience. The stream of consciousness (which has been separately studied) is an example. Why, then, should readers in 2011 (or 2019) be interested in the continuation of this particular device? Wouldn't it at least be interesting to ask why Enard feels that early twentieth-century experiments fit his theme of twenty-first century politics?
Then there's the problem of the disconnect between the political and historical themes of the novel and its anti-grammatical construction. In the New New York Times review ("River of Consciousness," January 9, 2011), Stephen Burn says that "the lack of formal boundaries permits an openness that counters the protagonist's obsession with the other boundaries men make and fight over," but that implies that all the "boundaries" the narrator recounts -- and the book is made of hundreds of such stories, from ancient Greek mythology to the wars in Iraq -- are equally well balanced by the tumbling endless prose. Is each act of warfare equally well answered by the missing periods that express it? Is each missing period a small indictment of the boundaries people construct? There's a mismatch between the specificity of the historical material and the sameness of the lack of punctuation.
Then there's the carelessness of writing without periods and other punctuation. It's easy to write a version of the prose Enard writes here. It's much easier, in many ways, than constructing long sentences: I would trade this entire 500-page book for the sharpness of a couple of William Gass's fabulous sentences in "On Being Blue."
There is also a disconnect between the prose and the consciousness it is meant to represent. In Beckett's prose, or in Molly Bloom's monologue, there is a reason for the tumbling endless narration. Here, in Burns's words, Enard "leaves the reader floating free in the liquid" of the narrator's mind: but why is the narrator equally angry, equally disoriented, equally atemporal, in respect to each individual moment in history? Even though Enard admires Joyce, Pound, Butor, and others, his mixture of allusions has more to do with Sebald: but in Sebald, different places and stories have differing weight, and require differing degrees of patience and coherence. Enard also admires the Pound of the Cantos, but those are deliberately fragmentary -- another high modernist trope -- while here, everything is melted as if it were the same.
And does it bear saying that the writing and the allusions, are ponderous, portentous, and humorless? The weight of history has the same leaden quality here that it does in George Steiner. I wonder if what caught the press's attention wasn't the very superficial combination of a gimmick (a long sentence), a leaden world-historical seriousness, and the commonplace rehearsal of Mediterranean political guilt and honor. I notice several of the endorsements are from French television and journalism.
In brief: the book is full of stories, and some of the stories are full of passion, but letting your sentences slump is not a radical strategy: it's a way of not working hard to make language fit its subject.
The reviews, pre-publication reviews, and endorsements of this novel all focused on the notion that it is a single long sentence. (For example Patrick Reardon in the Chicago Tribune, December 9, 2008, which was included in the publisher's press pack.)
But this book is not one sentence, for at least four reasons. Two of them are listed in an excellent short survey of long sentences by Tim Parks (New York Times, December 24, 2010, in the Book Review, p. 27):
1. The sentence is "compromised" by 23 chapter breaks.
2. Three of the chapters are excerpts from an imaginary book that the narrator in "Zone" is reading, and those three chapters are full of periods.
But there are two stronger reasons why "Zone" isn't a sentence:
3. Enard sometimes gives up commas, so that the prose becomes agrammatical. It's not a sentence if it is a string of sentence fragments.
4. He mixes tenses, doesn't observe parallel constructions, doesn't avoid run-on phrases, and doesn't make any attempt to structure his book according to subject, verb, and object: in other words, he only takes intermittent notice of the convention called the sentence.
Still, it's hard to see how any of this matters. By concentrating on the supposed single sentence, the publicity engine that drove readers to this book missed other more important points. (The same pattern repeated in 2019 with Lucy Ellmann's "Ducks, Newburyport," and Ellmann—I assume it was her—answered one of my comments on Twitter by saying it was one sentence "in spirit.")
First is the literary genealogy of the long sentence. It's a typically modernist strategy, most famously used by Joyce, Faulkner, and Beckett, intended to represent experience. The stream of consciousness (which has been separately studied) is an example. Why, then, should readers in 2011 (or 2019) be interested in the continuation of this particular device? Wouldn't it at least be interesting to ask why Enard feels that early twentieth-century experiments fit his theme of twenty-first century politics?
Then there's the problem of the disconnect between the political and historical themes of the novel and its anti-grammatical construction. In the New New York Times review ("River of Consciousness," January 9, 2011), Stephen Burn says that "the lack of formal boundaries permits an openness that counters the protagonist's obsession with the other boundaries men make and fight over," but that implies that all the "boundaries" the narrator recounts -- and the book is made of hundreds of such stories, from ancient Greek mythology to the wars in Iraq -- are equally well balanced by the tumbling endless prose. Is each act of warfare equally well answered by the missing periods that express it? Is each missing period a small indictment of the boundaries people construct? There's a mismatch between the specificity of the historical material and the sameness of the lack of punctuation.
Then there's the carelessness of writing without periods and other punctuation. It's easy to write a version of the prose Enard writes here. It's much easier, in many ways, than constructing long sentences: I would trade this entire 500-page book for the sharpness of a couple of William Gass's fabulous sentences in "On Being Blue."
There is also a disconnect between the prose and the consciousness it is meant to represent. In Beckett's prose, or in Molly Bloom's monologue, there is a reason for the tumbling endless narration. Here, in Burns's words, Enard "leaves the reader floating free in the liquid" of the narrator's mind: but why is the narrator equally angry, equally disoriented, equally atemporal, in respect to each individual moment in history? Even though Enard admires Joyce, Pound, Butor, and others, his mixture of allusions has more to do with Sebald: but in Sebald, different places and stories have differing weight, and require differing degrees of patience and coherence. Enard also admires the Pound of the Cantos, but those are deliberately fragmentary -- another high modernist trope -- while here, everything is melted as if it were the same.
And does it bear saying that the writing and the allusions, are ponderous, portentous, and humorless? The weight of history has the same leaden quality here that it does in George Steiner. I wonder if what caught the press's attention wasn't the very superficial combination of a gimmick (a long sentence), a leaden world-historical seriousness, and the commonplace rehearsal of Mediterranean political guilt and honor. I notice several of the endorsements are from French television and journalism.
In brief: the book is full of stories, and some of the stories are full of passion, but letting your sentences slump is not a radical strategy: it's a way of not working hard to make language fit its subject.
November 7, 2014
A discontinuous sentence broken up by chapters, a few of which relate a traditionally formatted story (many sentences, paragraphs, etc) the narrator reads while on the train from Milan to Rome. Not really a single sentence, folks, but the formal aspects of this one only superficially interest, the way each comma-delineated phrase is like a train-track tie, which the book associates with bodies piled up on the horizontal. Like a cut-up of an encyclopedia of the secret history of 20th century European/Mediterranean atrocities, seamlessly streaming from the consciousness of a veteran of endless armed conflict and endless psychic wars whenever at rest (if never at peace). Namedrops and occasionally animates Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, Pound. Receives consistent nonintrustive canonical support from the Iliad. Every page lists exotic locations, not so Anglo names, wars, skirmishes, battles, conflicts, assassinations, genocides, all while alluding to classical mythology/long-lost antiquity, blending up a froth of world-weary and wartorn sophistication, like a Sebald/James Bond hybrid, like Vollmann oozing Euro essence (a mix of blood and Ouzo), like Keroauc invoking Zeus instead of Buddha, like a paramilitary Proust (oft alluded to, as well as Celine), all in all exactly like the narrator concocted by Monsieur Enard, born a few weeks before me. As ambitious in its way as Infinite Jest and other monsters (517 pages filled with words -- not much white space, no dialogue etc), yet nary a mention of advertisements -- the stuff that makes people sad in the Zone (the Mediterrean region, plus Serbia/Croatia, Austria/Germany, Paris, etc) is purely gruesome historical hysteria thanks to compounding violent revenge violently avenged, on and on to the apocalypse. Yeah! Good times! Maybe four stars rounded up for the sake of audacity, authority, originality, heft, scope, execution, oomph, language always pushing ahead, hard to look away yet hard to read in bed, recommended for walking readers or anyone reading on the move. Really a first-class foward-flowing associative collage of horrific histories, but never seemingly gory for the sake of gore (there's a great amputated forearm toward the end -- quotations to come), sometimes it's tender, a heartbreaking memory of a glimpse of white panties, the ecstatic sight of a pair of siren-like dolphins. A book everyone should probably read since it so generously suggests how much I at least don't know, not only the Iliad but mostly everything beyond the knowledge of the occurrence of everything that's happened over time in Germany, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria, on and on. Not really actually recommended for most readers but, for fans of Sebald, Bolano, Vollmann, for fans of intertexual and/or high-art international lit, this is a can't miss atrocity exhibition.
June 2, 2011
Énard is the spiral architect par excellence, conceiving and bringing forth something truly exceptional—an epic maelstrom of interiority, a narrative storm of bruising power, a breathless, beautiful, benumbing barrage of Mediterranean-mounted memories whose track-tied onrushing spans the tide-ticked sea of time—from the basest, the ugliest of materials: the limitless human capacity for violence, irrationality, depravity, savagery, and self-deception.
Conceits exist within the book's framework and design: the text is composed as a single five-hundred and seventeen page sentence, with each individual page representing a kilometer traveled over plain, across mountain and through city along the high-speed train route between Milan and Rome on a chilly December evening. Although limited to a single period on the final page, Énard has divided his story into twenty-four sections, a homage to an Iliad that serves as both inspiration and mythological orchestra for the torrent of fevered and bloodstained remembrances that take place within, and which allow him the insertion of a novella—recounting the melancholy triangulation between a trio of stateless Palestinian insurgents pinned inside Beirut during the midpoint years of the vicious Lebanese Civil War—briefly read en voyage by the story's narrator, and which prose actually adheres to the standardized rules of grammar. This short fiction-within-fiction also features a heroic archetype in one these three Palestinian fighters—a man dead from the first word—who functions as an idealized repository of all the nobility, self-sacrifice, and human feeling that the narrating consciousness finds so desperately lacking in the miasmic chain of ghost-riddled events that comprise his own life's memory.
And what a memory this excruciated, suppurating spirit has amassed over the course of a life lived in and around the Zone—a euphemism for the various invisibly-demarcated geographic areas endowed with the appellation nation that abut upon the centralizing watery mass known as the Mediterranean Sea. This wracked individual, one Francis Servain Mirkovic, the sole male offspring of a union between a fiercely proud Croatian expatriate mother and an icily pragmatic French father, rode an adolescent attraction to neo-fascist trappings into a trial enlistment in the French military, a brief stint followed by an enthusiastic offer to volunteer with the Croatian paramilitary forces then engaged in a desperate struggle against a well-equipped Serbian army determined to prevent Croatia's independence. Present and involved through a goodly portion of the savage Balkan Wars of the early nineties—a service that secretly exhilarates the mother and disturbs the father—Francis will experience the elation of finding brothers-in-arms and the deflation of outliving them, emerging at the end of it all an emotionally crippled man. After a period of peregrinations about the Zone, he ends up joining the French Intelligence Service, where his experiences, fluency, and outwardly personable demeanor recommend him to the position of traveling liaison with a number of the sibling secret services located within the environs of the Zone.
Yet he is tortured by his war experiences, the savagery within him they unleashed, and the toll they have enacted upon his personal life, and it drives him to seek out the gruesome, repellently fascinating details of the prolific and variegated enactments of human violence that comprise such a significant portion of the history of the Zone; and by combining his own recollections and learned history with the stories and anecdotes related by his colleagues in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering, he has persistently—and surreptitiously—amassed a copious collection of names, photographs, dates, and evidence detailing those who were killed and those who did the killing. Having reached a breaking point in his life, enslaved by alcoholism and unable to emotionally connect with the women who have entered his life, Francis has assumed the identity of an institutionalized childhood acquaintance and fled both his work and his home in Paris, his destination the Eternal City, Rome—where he plans to sell his extensive chronicle of murder-at-large to agents of the Vatican and retire anon upon the proceeds he expects to reap from this macabre exchange.
To describe all of the above is not to give anything away, for almost the entirety of this information is made available in the opening section—indeed, the course of this motion-based tale is one of experiencing the colliding and rebounding stream-of-thought that flows unimpeded through the increasingly frenzied mind of Francis the Consumed. In relating the details of his life he returns time and again to the same situations, imparting through the roaring flame of his incendiary verbal barrage the flickers of new information, new names, new details, all of which combine to make clearer the picture he painted of these various portions of his life upon the previous visit. It is slowly, but inexorably revealed that Francis is the offspring of fascist violence married to capitalist democratic violence, with a strain of communism running at the margins, via his mother's connection to the Croatian Ustashi and his father's disturbing occupation during the Algerian War; born with a barbarous streak that ever lurks under the surface, an inherent strain of violent longings that have alienated him from two of his previous lovers and threaten to derail his current relationship with a third.
Intermingled with the story of Francis' life as a warrior and spy immersed within the sanguinary cycles of the Zone are his sidelong ruminations upon the actions of a slew of (in)famous personages who left their mark upon these environs: Ezra Pound, Jean Genet, Cervantes, José Millán-Astray, Ante Pavelic, Gavrillo Princep, Diocletian, a trio of Nazi death camp commandants, William Burroughs, Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce, Caravaggio—and this but a sample. A particular focus is given to the destructive pasts and presents of the Balkans, Spain, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle Eastern abrasions of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, with an appreciable nod to the currently inflamed War on Terror and the Zone continuities found in Guantánamo—all interconnected with the tessellates of Francis' story by means of an impressive ingenuity and cohesion. There are also repeated references to the Trojan War and, in particular, to the fickle and fateful meddling by the gods and goddesses of the Greek Pantheon; indeed, to the war-warped perspective of the train-bound narrator, the capricious presence of a Zeus, a Hades, an Apollo or Athena resonates more trenchantly to the blood-drenched travails of the Mediterranean-ringed world than the remote and hollow God worshiped by the three great monotheistic religions who have wreaked such a pronounced slaughter upon each other over the ages.
Such a book carries with it the potentiality for pretension or bathos, amongst others, but Énard amazingly avoids all perils—the entirety is executed to within a degree of perfection. The collision of thoughts makes the text difficult to find the rhythm of out of the gate, but surprisingly quickly it settles into a pattern that flows along with an unstoppable force of compulsion. The detailing of one violent, vicious act after another could hobble another book, but the matter-of-factness of Francis' voice, the way he blends the murderous history distilled from real life with the personal experience—deceit?—that has left him so scarred, such a hollow shell of a man, and the energized impartiality with which he connects the disparate fragments of his overwhelming obsession channel the sickening repetition of murder and rape and destruction—and this is, in no uncertain terms, an unrelenting presentation of crimes overwhelmingly perpetrated by men and cruelly inflicted with a depressing regularity upon women and children—into a form that illuminates the story while driving it forward in a thoroughly readable manner. There is a sickness in humanity, one from which it seems incapable of attaining a cure; and Francis has become a specialist in the permutations of this sickness as it played and plays out within the Zone, hoping—vainly—that by confronting the ghosts of our collective and individual inhumanity he can exorcise those ghosts created by his own. It would seem an unlikely thing that a book convulsed with the episodic revelations of unrestrained violence—there is more than a hint of the influence of Pierre Guyotat running through this affair—could provide such an amazing reading experience; but Énard—with full credit to the absolutely brilliant translation by Charlotte Mandell—pulls it off in spades and in style. The mystery behind Francis' life as a spy and his sudden flight to Rome imbues Zone with the taste of a thriller, whilst the single-sentence montage of thought barrage represents a twist upon the devices of Thomas Bernhard; it is as if Rudolf from Concrete had decided to turn his contemplation from how incorporeal nature and blood-relations torment solitary genius and prevent it from ever achieving anything firm to that of how mankind, in general, willingly torments and kills others in mass quantities through a grisly intermingling of a desire for vengeance, a sense of power, a pervasive fear, and an aggressive instinct that hums within the muscles and the neural network. I would not be in a rush to immerse myself anew within the crimson confines of this writer's imagination—but, in time, it is a trip that I will most definitely make.
Conceits exist within the book's framework and design: the text is composed as a single five-hundred and seventeen page sentence, with each individual page representing a kilometer traveled over plain, across mountain and through city along the high-speed train route between Milan and Rome on a chilly December evening. Although limited to a single period on the final page, Énard has divided his story into twenty-four sections, a homage to an Iliad that serves as both inspiration and mythological orchestra for the torrent of fevered and bloodstained remembrances that take place within, and which allow him the insertion of a novella—recounting the melancholy triangulation between a trio of stateless Palestinian insurgents pinned inside Beirut during the midpoint years of the vicious Lebanese Civil War—briefly read en voyage by the story's narrator, and which prose actually adheres to the standardized rules of grammar. This short fiction-within-fiction also features a heroic archetype in one these three Palestinian fighters—a man dead from the first word—who functions as an idealized repository of all the nobility, self-sacrifice, and human feeling that the narrating consciousness finds so desperately lacking in the miasmic chain of ghost-riddled events that comprise his own life's memory.
And what a memory this excruciated, suppurating spirit has amassed over the course of a life lived in and around the Zone—a euphemism for the various invisibly-demarcated geographic areas endowed with the appellation nation that abut upon the centralizing watery mass known as the Mediterranean Sea. This wracked individual, one Francis Servain Mirkovic, the sole male offspring of a union between a fiercely proud Croatian expatriate mother and an icily pragmatic French father, rode an adolescent attraction to neo-fascist trappings into a trial enlistment in the French military, a brief stint followed by an enthusiastic offer to volunteer with the Croatian paramilitary forces then engaged in a desperate struggle against a well-equipped Serbian army determined to prevent Croatia's independence. Present and involved through a goodly portion of the savage Balkan Wars of the early nineties—a service that secretly exhilarates the mother and disturbs the father—Francis will experience the elation of finding brothers-in-arms and the deflation of outliving them, emerging at the end of it all an emotionally crippled man. After a period of peregrinations about the Zone, he ends up joining the French Intelligence Service, where his experiences, fluency, and outwardly personable demeanor recommend him to the position of traveling liaison with a number of the sibling secret services located within the environs of the Zone.
Yet he is tortured by his war experiences, the savagery within him they unleashed, and the toll they have enacted upon his personal life, and it drives him to seek out the gruesome, repellently fascinating details of the prolific and variegated enactments of human violence that comprise such a significant portion of the history of the Zone; and by combining his own recollections and learned history with the stories and anecdotes related by his colleagues in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering, he has persistently—and surreptitiously—amassed a copious collection of names, photographs, dates, and evidence detailing those who were killed and those who did the killing. Having reached a breaking point in his life, enslaved by alcoholism and unable to emotionally connect with the women who have entered his life, Francis has assumed the identity of an institutionalized childhood acquaintance and fled both his work and his home in Paris, his destination the Eternal City, Rome—where he plans to sell his extensive chronicle of murder-at-large to agents of the Vatican and retire anon upon the proceeds he expects to reap from this macabre exchange.
To describe all of the above is not to give anything away, for almost the entirety of this information is made available in the opening section—indeed, the course of this motion-based tale is one of experiencing the colliding and rebounding stream-of-thought that flows unimpeded through the increasingly frenzied mind of Francis the Consumed. In relating the details of his life he returns time and again to the same situations, imparting through the roaring flame of his incendiary verbal barrage the flickers of new information, new names, new details, all of which combine to make clearer the picture he painted of these various portions of his life upon the previous visit. It is slowly, but inexorably revealed that Francis is the offspring of fascist violence married to capitalist democratic violence, with a strain of communism running at the margins, via his mother's connection to the Croatian Ustashi and his father's disturbing occupation during the Algerian War; born with a barbarous streak that ever lurks under the surface, an inherent strain of violent longings that have alienated him from two of his previous lovers and threaten to derail his current relationship with a third.
Intermingled with the story of Francis' life as a warrior and spy immersed within the sanguinary cycles of the Zone are his sidelong ruminations upon the actions of a slew of (in)famous personages who left their mark upon these environs: Ezra Pound, Jean Genet, Cervantes, José Millán-Astray, Ante Pavelic, Gavrillo Princep, Diocletian, a trio of Nazi death camp commandants, William Burroughs, Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce, Caravaggio—and this but a sample. A particular focus is given to the destructive pasts and presents of the Balkans, Spain, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle Eastern abrasions of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, with an appreciable nod to the currently inflamed War on Terror and the Zone continuities found in Guantánamo—all interconnected with the tessellates of Francis' story by means of an impressive ingenuity and cohesion. There are also repeated references to the Trojan War and, in particular, to the fickle and fateful meddling by the gods and goddesses of the Greek Pantheon; indeed, to the war-warped perspective of the train-bound narrator, the capricious presence of a Zeus, a Hades, an Apollo or Athena resonates more trenchantly to the blood-drenched travails of the Mediterranean-ringed world than the remote and hollow God worshiped by the three great monotheistic religions who have wreaked such a pronounced slaughter upon each other over the ages.
Such a book carries with it the potentiality for pretension or bathos, amongst others, but Énard amazingly avoids all perils—the entirety is executed to within a degree of perfection. The collision of thoughts makes the text difficult to find the rhythm of out of the gate, but surprisingly quickly it settles into a pattern that flows along with an unstoppable force of compulsion. The detailing of one violent, vicious act after another could hobble another book, but the matter-of-factness of Francis' voice, the way he blends the murderous history distilled from real life with the personal experience—deceit?—that has left him so scarred, such a hollow shell of a man, and the energized impartiality with which he connects the disparate fragments of his overwhelming obsession channel the sickening repetition of murder and rape and destruction—and this is, in no uncertain terms, an unrelenting presentation of crimes overwhelmingly perpetrated by men and cruelly inflicted with a depressing regularity upon women and children—into a form that illuminates the story while driving it forward in a thoroughly readable manner. There is a sickness in humanity, one from which it seems incapable of attaining a cure; and Francis has become a specialist in the permutations of this sickness as it played and plays out within the Zone, hoping—vainly—that by confronting the ghosts of our collective and individual inhumanity he can exorcise those ghosts created by his own. It would seem an unlikely thing that a book convulsed with the episodic revelations of unrestrained violence—there is more than a hint of the influence of Pierre Guyotat running through this affair—could provide such an amazing reading experience; but Énard—with full credit to the absolutely brilliant translation by Charlotte Mandell—pulls it off in spades and in style. The mystery behind Francis' life as a spy and his sudden flight to Rome imbues Zone with the taste of a thriller, whilst the single-sentence montage of thought barrage represents a twist upon the devices of Thomas Bernhard; it is as if Rudolf from Concrete had decided to turn his contemplation from how incorporeal nature and blood-relations torment solitary genius and prevent it from ever achieving anything firm to that of how mankind, in general, willingly torments and kills others in mass quantities through a grisly intermingling of a desire for vengeance, a sense of power, a pervasive fear, and an aggressive instinct that hums within the muscles and the neural network. I would not be in a rush to immerse myself anew within the crimson confines of this writer's imagination—but, in time, it is a trip that I will most definitely make.
March 25, 2022
Da un po� Matias Enard mi intrigava, ma la lettura di Zona è stata una botta di vita.
Francis, spia riciclata alla fine di una un’esperienza nella guerra croato-bosniaca, dopo aver messo insieme documenti scottanti in una valigetta, prende un Frecciarossa Milano � Roma per andare a vendere le sue informazioni a qualche pezzo grosso, pare in Vaticano, e cambiare finalmente vita, magari accanto a una donna che non faccia troppe domande.
Il viaggio inizia, e parte anche tutto il racconto non solo della sua vita, ma anche di tutte le informazioni di cui è venuto in possesso, le atrocità, i tradimenti, le barbarie di cui ha raccolto le testimonianze, pagando informatori, muovendosi in incognita, fingendosi turista in quella “Zona� che gli è stata assegnata, il Mediterraneo, mare racchiuso da terre macchiate di sangue, intrise di violenza, segnate da massacri.
…così come cinquant’anni dopo i francesi in Algeria avrebbero “raggruppato� i civili musulmani dietro il filo spinato per poterli controllare meglio, sempre campi di concentramento, ancora campi, campi spagnoli per gli abitanti del Rif compi italiani per i libici campi turchi per gli armeni campi francesi per gli algerini campi britannici per i greci campi croati per i serbi campi tedeschi per gli italiani campi�
Ma non c’� redenzione in un mondo complesso: dove la violenza pone i suoi artigli vi è dolore. Il dolore dei soldati è diverso da quello delle loro vittime, ma è sempre dolore alla fine. Anche quello del boia, che si porta appresso le immagini delle sue infamie e dei suoi ricordi, e che alla fine non si sente degno nemmeno di essere amato.
Una discesa verso Roma superando ogni stazione di sosta, dove si intrecciano le storie di personaggi realmente vissuti, una trama di vicende, di amori e di inganni, un viaggio in treno in cui passa il mondo intero. Confini che mutano, popoli che scompaiono, un atlante impossibile da delineare se non attraverso i morti, Zombi che ritornano per tormentare la nostra coscienza. Morti massacrati, brutalizzati, decapitati, come solo Caravaggio poteva mostrare.
Ma è la scrittura di Enard che mi ha stregata, ricca di citazioni, di rimandi, di personaggi di cui non sapevo nulla. Una prosa ritmica, con una punteggiatura quasi inesistente, ma funzionale per descrivere il flusso di coscienza del protagonista. Qualcuno ha detto che questo libro è in fondo fatto da un’unica frase, io vi ho colto un epos da vertigine, non solo per i numerosi rimandi all’Iliade di Omero (sarà un caso che i capitoli sono XXIV?), ma per una narrazione carica di tensione, che non si scioglie fino alla fine.
Alla fine Zeus è stato clemente, ha riposto la folgore nella sua scatola, il cielo si è aperto di colpo in una grande luce bianca
Io invece, appena riposto il libro sono andata a cercare vecchi atlanti, informazioni su personaggi di cui poco o nulla sapevo, come dopo essere precipitata in una biblioteca in disordine in cui era importante trovare un filo, un nesso per riappropriarmi di vicende storiche che mi erano passate accanto senza che me ne accorgessi.
Sicuro che Enard torno a cercarlo.
Francis, spia riciclata alla fine di una un’esperienza nella guerra croato-bosniaca, dopo aver messo insieme documenti scottanti in una valigetta, prende un Frecciarossa Milano � Roma per andare a vendere le sue informazioni a qualche pezzo grosso, pare in Vaticano, e cambiare finalmente vita, magari accanto a una donna che non faccia troppe domande.
Il viaggio inizia, e parte anche tutto il racconto non solo della sua vita, ma anche di tutte le informazioni di cui è venuto in possesso, le atrocità, i tradimenti, le barbarie di cui ha raccolto le testimonianze, pagando informatori, muovendosi in incognita, fingendosi turista in quella “Zona� che gli è stata assegnata, il Mediterraneo, mare racchiuso da terre macchiate di sangue, intrise di violenza, segnate da massacri.
…così come cinquant’anni dopo i francesi in Algeria avrebbero “raggruppato� i civili musulmani dietro il filo spinato per poterli controllare meglio, sempre campi di concentramento, ancora campi, campi spagnoli per gli abitanti del Rif compi italiani per i libici campi turchi per gli armeni campi francesi per gli algerini campi britannici per i greci campi croati per i serbi campi tedeschi per gli italiani campi�
Ma non c’� redenzione in un mondo complesso: dove la violenza pone i suoi artigli vi è dolore. Il dolore dei soldati è diverso da quello delle loro vittime, ma è sempre dolore alla fine. Anche quello del boia, che si porta appresso le immagini delle sue infamie e dei suoi ricordi, e che alla fine non si sente degno nemmeno di essere amato.
Una discesa verso Roma superando ogni stazione di sosta, dove si intrecciano le storie di personaggi realmente vissuti, una trama di vicende, di amori e di inganni, un viaggio in treno in cui passa il mondo intero. Confini che mutano, popoli che scompaiono, un atlante impossibile da delineare se non attraverso i morti, Zombi che ritornano per tormentare la nostra coscienza. Morti massacrati, brutalizzati, decapitati, come solo Caravaggio poteva mostrare.
Ma è la scrittura di Enard che mi ha stregata, ricca di citazioni, di rimandi, di personaggi di cui non sapevo nulla. Una prosa ritmica, con una punteggiatura quasi inesistente, ma funzionale per descrivere il flusso di coscienza del protagonista. Qualcuno ha detto che questo libro è in fondo fatto da un’unica frase, io vi ho colto un epos da vertigine, non solo per i numerosi rimandi all’Iliade di Omero (sarà un caso che i capitoli sono XXIV?), ma per una narrazione carica di tensione, che non si scioglie fino alla fine.
Alla fine Zeus è stato clemente, ha riposto la folgore nella sua scatola, il cielo si è aperto di colpo in una grande luce bianca
Io invece, appena riposto il libro sono andata a cercare vecchi atlanti, informazioni su personaggi di cui poco o nulla sapevo, come dopo essere precipitata in una biblioteca in disordine in cui era importante trovare un filo, un nesso per riappropriarmi di vicende storiche che mi erano passate accanto senza che me ne accorgessi.
Sicuro che Enard torno a cercarlo.
February 28, 2022
Reposting this review as reading , Jean Stewart's translation of Michel Butor's novel, La modification (1957), Enard's inspiration is clearer to me, this novel coming 50 years after Butor's prize winning work, and each narrated on a train journey to Rome.
...Rome where all roads lead before being lost in the night what will I do you're always tempted to retrace your steps to go back to where you lived, the way Caravaggio painter of decapitation wanted to see Rome again, despite the luxury of Malta the rotting beauty of Naples, constantly and ceaselessly Caravaggio desired the Eternal City the shady neighbourhoods the cutthroats around the mausoleum of Augustus the casual lovers games brawls laughable life where I will go back to, me, to Mostar crushed by the shells to Venice with the handsome Ghassan and Ezra Pound the mad, to Trieste to the cursed villa of the Herzog von Auschwitz, to Beirut with the fierce Palestinians to Algeirs the white to lick the blood of martyrs or the burnt wounds of the innocent men tortured by my father, to Tangier with Burroughs the wild-eyed murdered Genet the luminous invert and Choukri the eternally starving, to Taormina to get drunk with Lowry, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Marseille with my grandmother in love with crowned heads, to Split with Vlaho the disabled, to Alexandria the sleeping, to Salonika city of ghosts or to the White Island graveyard of heroes...
The one thing everyone knows about Mathias Énard's Zone is that it is a507 521 page (1 for every km of the narrator's train journey from Milan to Rome) single sentence. Except in reality it isn't. The text is broken into 24 chapters (actually 23 as Chapter XVI seems to be missing - a typographical error or of artistic significance? I suspect the former) and while each chapter starts mid-sentence it doesn't leave off exactly where the last ended. Within chapters as well commas serve to punctuate the text - as per the extract above.
The overall effect works well - the novel is much more readable than the description might suggest, and yet the reader is sucked into the rhythm of the narration, mirroring that of the train journey, such that one has to consciously pause for breath - usually to follow up one of the many references to history and literature.
Zone is narrated by Francis Servian Mirkovic, a French-Croatian, currently working for the French secret service, but with a shady past in the Croatian right-wing militia. He is on the last leg of a journey to Rome where he plans to sell secrets he has gathered during his intelligence work to the Vatican and then take on a new identity and life.
Mirkovic's opening line, in the original, is “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme", rendered in English as "everything is harder once you reach man's estate" (a Twelfth Night reference, not present in the original but agreed with the author as better than a literal translation), and we increasingly see that Mirkovic is at a cross-roads in his life. He describes his early right-wing leaning as mere youthful infatuation ("I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist�) and appears rather detached from the war in which he fought, but a more complex picture emerges over the second half of the novel - and one becomes increasingly uneasy about what really awaits him in Rome.
Mirkovic's intelligence speciality is the Zone - the area around the mediterranean from Barcelona to Beirut - but while his professional interest is in the present day, his personal interest, and briefcase of documents, extend further back in time. His thoughts during the journey span Troy, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hannibal, the Battle of Lepanto, Napoleon, the 1st World War, Spanish Civil War, 2nd World War, Lebanese civil war, and the Croatian conflicts of the 90s, and that's all in the first 100 pages. Indeed Énard devotes the novel to "the witnesses, victims or killers, in Barcelona, Beirut, Damascus, Zagreb, Algeirs, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Rome, Trieste, Istanbul."
Mirkovic's (via Énard) also has a highly literally take on "the Zone", and in particular authors as well known for their life in the Zone and/or political views as their literary output. Explicit influences, to name a few, include Tsirkas� Drifting Cities, William Burroughs� Naked Lunch, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Apollinaire’s Zone, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and the right-wing Maurice Bardeche's Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne.
Amongst the many historical figures that he considers, he appears to have a particular fascination with José Millán Astray, Francoist founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, best known for his "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!" proclamation - Mirkovic doesn't share his apparent scorn for intelligence, but does share his fascination with death. Indeed it is the association with starting his journey in Milan that sparks Mirkovic's 500+ page stream of thoughts
Zone has been wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mendell, who seems to specialise in long and difficult translations from the German (notably the 1000 page Les Bienveillantes, a terrible novel but an excellent translation).
Overall an extremely impressive novel, much more readable than advance publicity might suggest.
-----------------
As an addendum to my review, Chapter XVI really was missing in my copy - and many thanks to the publisher )/user/show/3...) who got in touch and sent me a revised version. It says something - positive actually - about Zone that a missing 14 page chapter didn't disrupt the narration at all!
...Rome where all roads lead before being lost in the night what will I do you're always tempted to retrace your steps to go back to where you lived, the way Caravaggio painter of decapitation wanted to see Rome again, despite the luxury of Malta the rotting beauty of Naples, constantly and ceaselessly Caravaggio desired the Eternal City the shady neighbourhoods the cutthroats around the mausoleum of Augustus the casual lovers games brawls laughable life where I will go back to, me, to Mostar crushed by the shells to Venice with the handsome Ghassan and Ezra Pound the mad, to Trieste to the cursed villa of the Herzog von Auschwitz, to Beirut with the fierce Palestinians to Algeirs the white to lick the blood of martyrs or the burnt wounds of the innocent men tortured by my father, to Tangier with Burroughs the wild-eyed murdered Genet the luminous invert and Choukri the eternally starving, to Taormina to get drunk with Lowry, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Marseille with my grandmother in love with crowned heads, to Split with Vlaho the disabled, to Alexandria the sleeping, to Salonika city of ghosts or to the White Island graveyard of heroes...
The one thing everyone knows about Mathias Énard's Zone is that it is a
The overall effect works well - the novel is much more readable than the description might suggest, and yet the reader is sucked into the rhythm of the narration, mirroring that of the train journey, such that one has to consciously pause for breath - usually to follow up one of the many references to history and literature.
Zone is narrated by Francis Servian Mirkovic, a French-Croatian, currently working for the French secret service, but with a shady past in the Croatian right-wing militia. He is on the last leg of a journey to Rome where he plans to sell secrets he has gathered during his intelligence work to the Vatican and then take on a new identity and life.
Mirkovic's opening line, in the original, is “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme", rendered in English as "everything is harder once you reach man's estate" (a Twelfth Night reference, not present in the original but agreed with the author as better than a literal translation), and we increasingly see that Mirkovic is at a cross-roads in his life. He describes his early right-wing leaning as mere youthful infatuation ("I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist�) and appears rather detached from the war in which he fought, but a more complex picture emerges over the second half of the novel - and one becomes increasingly uneasy about what really awaits him in Rome.
Mirkovic's intelligence speciality is the Zone - the area around the mediterranean from Barcelona to Beirut - but while his professional interest is in the present day, his personal interest, and briefcase of documents, extend further back in time. His thoughts during the journey span Troy, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hannibal, the Battle of Lepanto, Napoleon, the 1st World War, Spanish Civil War, 2nd World War, Lebanese civil war, and the Croatian conflicts of the 90s, and that's all in the first 100 pages. Indeed Énard devotes the novel to "the witnesses, victims or killers, in Barcelona, Beirut, Damascus, Zagreb, Algeirs, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Rome, Trieste, Istanbul."
Mirkovic's (via Énard) also has a highly literally take on "the Zone", and in particular authors as well known for their life in the Zone and/or political views as their literary output. Explicit influences, to name a few, include Tsirkas� Drifting Cities, William Burroughs� Naked Lunch, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Apollinaire’s Zone, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and the right-wing Maurice Bardeche's Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne.
Amongst the many historical figures that he considers, he appears to have a particular fascination with José Millán Astray, Francoist founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, best known for his "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!" proclamation - Mirkovic doesn't share his apparent scorn for intelligence, but does share his fascination with death. Indeed it is the association with starting his journey in Milan that sparks Mirkovic's 500+ page stream of thoughts
Zone has been wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mendell, who seems to specialise in long and difficult translations from the German (notably the 1000 page Les Bienveillantes, a terrible novel but an excellent translation).
Overall an extremely impressive novel, much more readable than advance publicity might suggest.
-----------------
As an addendum to my review, Chapter XVI really was missing in my copy - and many thanks to the publisher )/user/show/3...) who got in touch and sent me a revised version. It says something - positive actually - about Zone that a missing 14 page chapter didn't disrupt the narration at all!
August 4, 2021
Wenn ein Schriftsteller heute noch an das große Epos als literarische Form glaubt, ist es mit Sicherheit Mathias Énard. In akribischer Recherche trägt er enzyklopädische Versatzstücke zusammen, um daraus ein erzählerisches Netz zu knüpfen, welches ganze Jahrzehnte und Jahrhundert umspannt. Kaleidoskopartig fügen sich die einzelnen Splitter zu einem schillernden Gesamtbild. Dabei folgt er oft dem gleichen Grundmuster. In Kompass war ein Orientalist in einer tiefen Lebenskrise der Dreh- und Angelpunkt, während in seinem neuestem Werk ein Anthropologe im Mittelpunkt steht, der die französische Provinz erkundet. Dieses Rezept scheint ihm zu liegen, denn bereits in seinem 2010 erschienenen Roman Die Zone ist die Konstellation die gleiche.
Francis Mirkovic, ehemaliger Soldat und Mitarbeiter des französischen Geheimdienst, befindet sich im Zug auf dem Weg von Mailand nach Rom. Er will dem Vatikan ein Dossier über Kriegsverbrecher und ihre Taten verkaufen. Die Dokumente hat er während seiner Tätigkeit in den Archiven des Geheimdienst über Jahre zusammengetragen. Während vor dem Zugfenster Städte und Landschaften Italiens vorbeiziehen, springt seine Erinnerung zu einzelnen Stationen seines Lebens. Erlebtes vermischt sich mit Gelesenem und Gehörtem. In einem steten Gedankenstrom fließt die Erzählung ohne Punkt und Komma dahin. Ein einziger Satz, in dem sich Zeiten und Kriege zu einem endlosen Kreislauf von Gewalt, Hass und Rache formen. Die persönliche Geschichte der Hauptfigur rückt zwar nicht in den Hintergrund, dient Énard im Grunde aber lediglich als Aufhänger, um ein episch breites Kriegspanorama zu entfalten.
Michel Foucault sprach einst vom Krieg als Motor der Institutionen und der Ordnung:
Bei Homer sind die Kämpfer von der Mania besessen, vom kriegerischen Wahn geblendet. Folgt man Énards Darstellung hat sich seitdem nicht viel verändert. Der Zyklus der Gewalt dauert an, ein Schlusspunkt ist nicht in Sicht. Nahtlos reiht sich ein Krieg an den anderen, ob in Spanien, Algerien, Libanon oder in Ex-Jugoslawien, nicht zu vergessen die beiden Weltkriege. Der moderne Achilleus Francis hat in den 1990er Jahren als Freiwilliger auf kroatischer Seite in Kroatien und Bosnien gekämpft. So lange bis er das Ziel des Kampfes aus den Augen verloren hat, wenn es denn überhaupt je ein Ziel gegeben hat. Kämpfen um des Kämpfen willens. Einem Wahn verfallen, der wohl bis zum Ende der Menschheit nicht aus dieser Welt verschwinden wird.
Gibt es einen Ausweg? Für Francis ist es das Dossier, mittels dessen er Absolution erlangen möchte. Denn selbst hat er sich schwerer Verbrechen schuldig gemacht. Darüber hinaus bleibt ihm nur die völlige Auslöschung seiner Identität. Sein persönliches Ende der Geschichte. Der müde Krieger verschwindet aus dem Blickfeld des Lesers und der Götter. Wie wir wissen, dreht sich die Welt trotzdem immer weiter. So könnte man den Roman mühelos mit den Kriegen der letzten Jahre um einige Kapitel erweitern.
Der pessimistische Grundton und die beschriebenen Gräueltaten machen das Buch zu keiner leichten Lektüre. Gleichzeitig fand ich es einmal mehr faszinierend, wie gut es Énard gelingt Fakten und Fiktion miteinander zu verbinden. Mein einziger Kritikpunkt betrifft die Ausgestaltung der Hauptfigur, die stellenweise ein wenig klischeehaft anmutet. Vermutlich liegt das auch am mythologischen Subtext, der dem Helden eine gewisse tragische Note abverlangt. Insgesamt war der Ausflug in Die Zone aber sehr lesenswert.
★★★★½
[Anmerkung: Der Titel weckt Assoziationen mit dem Film von Tarkowskij bzw. dem Sci-Fi-Klassiker der Strugatzkis. Die Hauptfigur weist tatsächlich einige Ähnlichkeiten mit dem Stalker auf. Beide sind Sammler, die sich auf gefährliches Terrain wagen. Nur bezeichnet die Zone bei Énard das Gebiet rund um das Mittelmeer und umfasst ungefähr die Regionen Europa, Nordafrika und Vorderasien.]
Francis Mirkovic, ehemaliger Soldat und Mitarbeiter des französischen Geheimdienst, befindet sich im Zug auf dem Weg von Mailand nach Rom. Er will dem Vatikan ein Dossier über Kriegsverbrecher und ihre Taten verkaufen. Die Dokumente hat er während seiner Tätigkeit in den Archiven des Geheimdienst über Jahre zusammengetragen. Während vor dem Zugfenster Städte und Landschaften Italiens vorbeiziehen, springt seine Erinnerung zu einzelnen Stationen seines Lebens. Erlebtes vermischt sich mit Gelesenem und Gehörtem. In einem steten Gedankenstrom fließt die Erzählung ohne Punkt und Komma dahin. Ein einziger Satz, in dem sich Zeiten und Kriege zu einem endlosen Kreislauf von Gewalt, Hass und Rache formen. Die persönliche Geschichte der Hauptfigur rückt zwar nicht in den Hintergrund, dient Énard im Grunde aber lediglich als Aufhänger, um ein episch breites Kriegspanorama zu entfalten.
Michel Foucault sprach einst vom Krieg als Motor der Institutionen und der Ordnung:
Das Gesetz ersteht aus wirklichen Schlachten, aus Siegen, aus Eroberungen mit ihren Schandtaten und ihren Schreckenshelden. Das Gesetz geht aus verbrannten Städten und verwüsteten Ländern hervor � Man muss unter dem Frieden den Krieg herauslesen.Eine Ansicht, der sich auch Mathias Énard offensichtlich anschließen kann. Denn auch bei ihm ist der Krieg eine Grundkonstante aller Gesellschaften. Eine historische Linie, die bis zu Homers Ilias zurückreicht. Das antike Epos bildet gewissermaßen den Urgrund in dem alle weiteren Ereignisse wurzeln. In diesem Sinne ist Francis Mirkovic eine Art Wiedergänger des mythologischen Helden Achilleus, der auf dem Wege der Metempsychose (Seelenwanderung) aus dem Hades zurückgekehrt ist. Ebenso wie das antike Vorbild, muss er das unabänderliche Schicksal tragen, dass ihm die Moiren (Schicksalsgöttinnen) gesponnen haben.
Bei Homer sind die Kämpfer von der Mania besessen, vom kriegerischen Wahn geblendet. Folgt man Énards Darstellung hat sich seitdem nicht viel verändert. Der Zyklus der Gewalt dauert an, ein Schlusspunkt ist nicht in Sicht. Nahtlos reiht sich ein Krieg an den anderen, ob in Spanien, Algerien, Libanon oder in Ex-Jugoslawien, nicht zu vergessen die beiden Weltkriege. Der moderne Achilleus Francis hat in den 1990er Jahren als Freiwilliger auf kroatischer Seite in Kroatien und Bosnien gekämpft. So lange bis er das Ziel des Kampfes aus den Augen verloren hat, wenn es denn überhaupt je ein Ziel gegeben hat. Kämpfen um des Kämpfen willens. Einem Wahn verfallen, der wohl bis zum Ende der Menschheit nicht aus dieser Welt verschwinden wird.
Gibt es einen Ausweg? Für Francis ist es das Dossier, mittels dessen er Absolution erlangen möchte. Denn selbst hat er sich schwerer Verbrechen schuldig gemacht. Darüber hinaus bleibt ihm nur die völlige Auslöschung seiner Identität. Sein persönliches Ende der Geschichte. Der müde Krieger verschwindet aus dem Blickfeld des Lesers und der Götter. Wie wir wissen, dreht sich die Welt trotzdem immer weiter. So könnte man den Roman mühelos mit den Kriegen der letzten Jahre um einige Kapitel erweitern.
Der pessimistische Grundton und die beschriebenen Gräueltaten machen das Buch zu keiner leichten Lektüre. Gleichzeitig fand ich es einmal mehr faszinierend, wie gut es Énard gelingt Fakten und Fiktion miteinander zu verbinden. Mein einziger Kritikpunkt betrifft die Ausgestaltung der Hauptfigur, die stellenweise ein wenig klischeehaft anmutet. Vermutlich liegt das auch am mythologischen Subtext, der dem Helden eine gewisse tragische Note abverlangt. Insgesamt war der Ausflug in Die Zone aber sehr lesenswert.
★★★★½
[Anmerkung: Der Titel weckt Assoziationen mit dem Film von Tarkowskij bzw. dem Sci-Fi-Klassiker der Strugatzkis. Die Hauptfigur weist tatsächlich einige Ähnlichkeiten mit dem Stalker auf. Beide sind Sammler, die sich auf gefährliches Terrain wagen. Nur bezeichnet die Zone bei Énard das Gebiet rund um das Mittelmeer und umfasst ungefähr die Regionen Europa, Nordafrika und Vorderasien.]
July 24, 2020
Ово је један силовит роман. Испричан у једном даху, у једној јединој реченици, са варљивом интерпункцијом или без ње, али то нимало не квари утисак и читање иде (зачудо) веома течно.
Френсис Сервен Мирковић француски је обавештајац (полу-Хрват, полу-Француз) чије је оперативно поље тзв. „Зона�, односно простор Средоземног мора тј. све што може да се подведе под појам Медитеран.
Mare Nostrum оивичено је вековним насиљем са свих страна, а Франсис се не либи да то насиље оправдава, потпомаже или, чак и сам врши, за свој или државни рачун, мање је важно. Много података и догађаја је обухваћено, од Тројанског рата, освајања Константинопоља, Битке код Лепанта, Алжирског рата за независност, усташких злочина у Другом светском рату, све до палестинско-израелских конфликата, немира у арапском свету, грађанског рата у Југославији... Стотине година замршене и насилне историје је стало у ово „свођењ� рачуна�.
Свих тих акција и догађаја Френсис се присећа током једног ноћног путовања возом од Милана до Рима, у вечери када је одлучио да је са тим „шпијунским� животом готово и кад жели да побегне од њега. Са собом носи кофер са „прљавим� подацима и тајнама које планира да прода Ватикану. Сећања теку исцепкано, лако се пребацује из садашњости у прошлост, своју или туђу, све у ритму воза у покрету.
Видљива је велика ерудиција аутора и одлично познавање поднебља које описује.
У тело романа уметнута су и 2-3 поглавља из фиктивне књиге фиктивног либанског писца Рафаела Кахле (то је литература коју наш путник чита у возу). Можда је могло и без тога, али никако ми то није умањило уживање у читању.
Свакако вреди прочитати.
Френсис Сервен Мирковић француски је обавештајац (полу-Хрват, полу-Француз) чије је оперативно поље тзв. „Зона�, односно простор Средоземног мора тј. све што може да се подведе под појам Медитеран.
Mare Nostrum оивичено је вековним насиљем са свих страна, а Франсис се не либи да то насиље оправдава, потпомаже или, чак и сам врши, за свој или државни рачун, мање је важно. Много података и догађаја је обухваћено, од Тројанског рата, освајања Константинопоља, Битке код Лепанта, Алжирског рата за независност, усташких злочина у Другом светском рату, све до палестинско-израелских конфликата, немира у арапском свету, грађанског рата у Југославији... Стотине година замршене и насилне историје је стало у ово „свођењ� рачуна�.
Свих тих акција и догађаја Френсис се присећа током једног ноћног путовања возом од Милана до Рима, у вечери када је одлучио да је са тим „шпијунским� животом готово и кад жели да побегне од њега. Са собом носи кофер са „прљавим� подацима и тајнама које планира да прода Ватикану. Сећања теку исцепкано, лако се пребацује из садашњости у прошлост, своју или туђу, све у ритму воза у покрету.
Видљива је велика ерудиција аутора и одлично познавање поднебља које описује.
У тело романа уметнута су и 2-3 поглавља из фиктивне књиге фиктивног либанског писца Рафаела Кахле (то је литература коју наш путник чита у возу). Можда је могло и без тога, али никако ми то није умањило уживање у читању.
Свакако вреди прочитати.
September 26, 2019
زون ..... ماتياس إينار
أفضل قراءات العام بلا منازع، ساحرة صادمة مثيرة وملهمة، ماتياس إينار واحد من أفضل الفرنسيين اللي قرأت لهم في حياتي، كل رواية له فيها متعة هائلة ودرس كتابي من الطراز الرفيع.
الجو الشرقي في رواياته لا مثيل له، بيقدر يخلطه في ثنايا وحبكة رواياته بقدرة مدهشة.
الرواية دي مافيهاش غلطة، من اول صفحة لآخر صفحة، بتدخل عالم بديع، وترجمة ماري طوق مبهرة.
أفضل قراءات العام بلا منازع، ساحرة صادمة مثيرة وملهمة، ماتياس إينار واحد من أفضل الفرنسيين اللي قرأت لهم في حياتي، كل رواية له فيها متعة هائلة ودرس كتابي من الطراز الرفيع.
الجو الشرقي في رواياته لا مثيل له، بيقدر يخلطه في ثنايا وحبكة رواياته بقدرة مدهشة.
الرواية دي مافيهاش غلطة، من اول صفحة لآخر صفحة، بتدخل عالم بديع، وترجمة ماري طوق مبهرة.
November 17, 2016
Very much worth your time. Not perfect, and I share some of the concerns set out by other reviewers about its lack of focus, and the arbitrary nature of the conceit governing its prose, but there is much here that is just fantastic
Read
April 7, 2023Video review, along with other Énard books:
July 31, 2022
Ci ho messo mesi a finirlo e la prima reazione, istintiva, una volta letta l’ultima parola, è stata quella di ricominciarlo da capo. Da oggi, c’� un motivo in più per amare così tanto la letteratura. Enard, alla prossima.
July 23, 2012
Mathias Enard’s Zone is a novel that while it can’t be said that it is breaking new ground, but it is synthesizing various threads of narrative experimentation and presenting them in a maximalist style that resembles a grand claiming of new territory. W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, David Markson’s later work, Bernhard’s endless paragraph and symphonic repetition, Pound and Eliot’s poetry, Joyce’s dreams, and even contemporary journalism on the middle east(Robert Fisk for example) are evoked here. This book if it resembles anything it is a meditation on the bloodstained history of the Mediterranean region, a panorama featuring its killers, victims, fascists, dreamers, artists, and writers. History as a gore stained daydream of a man with a very conflicted connection to that history, a daydream experienced on a train journey, the train taking the place of one of Sebald’s country walks or Bernhard’s museum benches. The World Wars, the Lebanese and Algerian Civil War, Cervantes and the battle of Lepanto, the fall of Yugoslavia are among the many subjects that haunt this book. The brutality of much of it, the book’s length, and the lack of much of the furniture of the realist novel might turn many off, but I found it compulsively readable and a book of prophetic resonance.
January 6, 2022
080913: other people may offer an educated appraisal, an abstract summation, a conflagration of literary allusions- the best I can do is talk of the effect of this work: stunning, visceral, horrific, endlessly sad. to simply recount the narrative, the frame of meditating on his train, the portrait within accessed by his memories, is insufficient...
this is the Zone. aside from this sharing designation with Pynchon, this work makes me think of - informed by twenty more years, by the dissolution of the Grand Narrative of Eastern European communism, but for me the difference is that this places in forefront the horrors of war, and there is no ultimate pattern, no historical necessity, no conspiracy, to unite or suggest meaning to the timeless horrors of this area, these countries, these players and victims, of this violence not the least perpetrated by our narrator...
i am strongly affected by this work, i am horrified, i am unable to think of any other work on war, on this area, that is so very real. people do terrible things to others, maybe thinking this is part of a grand movement, such as extermination of Jews, such as creation or defence of putative Homeland, or obscurities of repeating history, but we are here at ground level. here it is horror that mankind can afflict for any reason. do not pretend there is logic to this chaos. there is even some sort of book-within-the-book which allows something like a more usual story, but this is a fragment of, a gesture towards, motivation and desire and love, and it is unresolved and passes through our narrator, confused and annoyed it should summon his emotional response...
should mention: yes there is a lot of history, yes there are the haunted memories of the protagonist, yes like the train he rides- you might think you are getting somewhere, that there is a destination answering his thoughts, all the horrors, but even going back to allusions of Achilles, Hector, Troy, you are only ever on one track and the absolution or logic or even personal enlightenment, is forever deferred, is never answered, and maybe it is just me, but all these catalogs of atrocities or acts of war crimes- all and all and all, can never be shaped into sense...
at first, the way the story is told, in unbroken sentences for each twenty-four chapters, is bothersome and might even be thought only a gimmick. then the reader can begin to see, to read, to learn- that punctuation imposes order, grammatical if no more, and any suggestion of order is refused. how the story is told is what the story is told...
this is the Zone. aside from this sharing designation with Pynchon, this work makes me think of - informed by twenty more years, by the dissolution of the Grand Narrative of Eastern European communism, but for me the difference is that this places in forefront the horrors of war, and there is no ultimate pattern, no historical necessity, no conspiracy, to unite or suggest meaning to the timeless horrors of this area, these countries, these players and victims, of this violence not the least perpetrated by our narrator...
i am strongly affected by this work, i am horrified, i am unable to think of any other work on war, on this area, that is so very real. people do terrible things to others, maybe thinking this is part of a grand movement, such as extermination of Jews, such as creation or defence of putative Homeland, or obscurities of repeating history, but we are here at ground level. here it is horror that mankind can afflict for any reason. do not pretend there is logic to this chaos. there is even some sort of book-within-the-book which allows something like a more usual story, but this is a fragment of, a gesture towards, motivation and desire and love, and it is unresolved and passes through our narrator, confused and annoyed it should summon his emotional response...
should mention: yes there is a lot of history, yes there are the haunted memories of the protagonist, yes like the train he rides- you might think you are getting somewhere, that there is a destination answering his thoughts, all the horrors, but even going back to allusions of Achilles, Hector, Troy, you are only ever on one track and the absolution or logic or even personal enlightenment, is forever deferred, is never answered, and maybe it is just me, but all these catalogs of atrocities or acts of war crimes- all and all and all, can never be shaped into sense...
at first, the way the story is told, in unbroken sentences for each twenty-four chapters, is bothersome and might even be thought only a gimmick. then the reader can begin to see, to read, to learn- that punctuation imposes order, grammatical if no more, and any suggestion of order is refused. how the story is told is what the story is told...
April 24, 2022
«A volte ci sono istanti sospesi, tra due momenti, nell'aria, nell'eternità, una danza spalla contro spalla, il movimento di una mano, la scia di una barca, l'umanità alla ricerca della felicità, e poi tutto ricade, tutto ricade»
Un viaggio in treno tra Milano e Roma. L'ultimo viaggio di Francis Servain Mirković alias Yvan Deroy, un combattente e poi una spia e un trafficante che ha preso parte in maniera diretta o indiretta alle ultime guerre combattute nella zona compresa tra i Balcani e il Medioriente. La Zona: uno spazio geografico ma anche ideale, "la zona grigia, quelle delle ombre e dei manipolatori".
Un viaggio a ritroso tra le guerre che hanno insanguinato il Mediterraneo, dai tempi di Omero ai giorni nostri. Le guerre, la guerra. Tutte diverse e tutte uguali, con il loro carico di orrori e di inutilità. La guerra come destino, stigma, vizio del quale l'uomo non riesce a fare a meno.
Un racconto che è un lungo monologo, un viaggio nella memoria di un uomo figlio del suo tempo, che ha fatto quello che ha fatto spinto dalla sete di denaro, sesso, potere, "la santa Trinità del case officer".
L'inevitabilità sembra essere la cifra del romanzo, una descrizione di fatti, misfatti e bestialità ai quali il protagonista ha partecipato e per i quali non sembra provare particolare pentimento, al punto da commuoversi solo per le vicende del libro che sta leggendo, perfetta rappresentazione della liquidità di un'epoca in cui fiction e vita reale sembrano sfumare una nell'altra. "Mi inoltravo nella Zona senza passione ma senza disgusto, con una curiosità crescente per gli intrighi degli dèi irati" � dice Francis Mirković, come se il fatto di essere una pedina di un gioco che si ripete da sempre fosse sufficiente ad assolverlo dai suoi peccati, perché oggi come ieri � sembra dire Énard � siamo alla mercé dei capricci di Zeus, di Era e di Ares, perché ogni guerra è la guerra di Troia che si ripete.
Se la trama di Zona scorre per mano all'Iliade, lo stile è invece derivato direttamente da Sebald, con riferimenti e casualità (le "strizzatine d'occhio della storia", le definisce Énard), incroci che richiamano altri avvenimenti e costruiscono un percorso narrativo che mescola vicende accadute in tempi diversi.
i>Zona è una danza macabra, un girotondo intorno alla morte e all'inutilità per cui si muore, perché alla fine di ogni guerra arriverà sempre la ramazza del Tempo a cancellare il ricordi dei morti e i motivi per cui si sono sacrificati.
Un viaggio in treno tra Milano e Roma. L'ultimo viaggio di Francis Servain Mirković alias Yvan Deroy, un combattente e poi una spia e un trafficante che ha preso parte in maniera diretta o indiretta alle ultime guerre combattute nella zona compresa tra i Balcani e il Medioriente. La Zona: uno spazio geografico ma anche ideale, "la zona grigia, quelle delle ombre e dei manipolatori".
Un viaggio a ritroso tra le guerre che hanno insanguinato il Mediterraneo, dai tempi di Omero ai giorni nostri. Le guerre, la guerra. Tutte diverse e tutte uguali, con il loro carico di orrori e di inutilità. La guerra come destino, stigma, vizio del quale l'uomo non riesce a fare a meno.
Un racconto che è un lungo monologo, un viaggio nella memoria di un uomo figlio del suo tempo, che ha fatto quello che ha fatto spinto dalla sete di denaro, sesso, potere, "la santa Trinità del case officer".
L'inevitabilità sembra essere la cifra del romanzo, una descrizione di fatti, misfatti e bestialità ai quali il protagonista ha partecipato e per i quali non sembra provare particolare pentimento, al punto da commuoversi solo per le vicende del libro che sta leggendo, perfetta rappresentazione della liquidità di un'epoca in cui fiction e vita reale sembrano sfumare una nell'altra. "Mi inoltravo nella Zona senza passione ma senza disgusto, con una curiosità crescente per gli intrighi degli dèi irati" � dice Francis Mirković, come se il fatto di essere una pedina di un gioco che si ripete da sempre fosse sufficiente ad assolverlo dai suoi peccati, perché oggi come ieri � sembra dire Énard � siamo alla mercé dei capricci di Zeus, di Era e di Ares, perché ogni guerra è la guerra di Troia che si ripete.
Se la trama di Zona scorre per mano all'Iliade, lo stile è invece derivato direttamente da Sebald, con riferimenti e casualità (le "strizzatine d'occhio della storia", le definisce Énard), incroci che richiamano altri avvenimenti e costruiscono un percorso narrativo che mescola vicende accadute in tempi diversi.
i>Zona è una danza macabra, un girotondo intorno alla morte e all'inutilità per cui si muore, perché alla fine di ogni guerra arriverà sempre la ramazza del Tempo a cancellare il ricordi dei morti e i motivi per cui si sono sacrificati.
July 26, 2017
An excellent book. It could be a superb book, but it has 3 problems IMHO: 1) it's too long - I usually prefer shorter books, I rarely see the point in adding some 300 extra pages to a perfect story, but that's just my opinion; 2) sometimes Énard is just plain pretentious - he's no doubt a man of culture and he clearly knows the Mediterranean basin as few, but he shows off all his knowledge, and I don't mean there's a problem regarding all the issues he writes about, that's actually one of his highest skills, but I quite hate name dropping and he's a bit of a name dropping-addict; 3) the chapters written in the form of a pseudo-excerpt from a fictitious book by a fictitious Lebanese writer are just fillers and they add nothing to the story, except an incongruous break in style and rhythm (a problem which gets mingled with the aforementioned problems - these chapters make the book longer than needed and are quite pretentious, and even a bit cheesy).
I could state he could also use a bit more of humor in this kind of novel, but then there are authors, such as Sebald, who don't know the meaning of humor and are still good, so I won't go any farther.
Anyway, it's really a good book, an excellent approach to the history of violence and revenge with a fluid and compelling style. And Énard is a master when it gets to glue different stories in a perfect patchwork. I recommend it.
I could state he could also use a bit more of humor in this kind of novel, but then there are authors, such as Sebald, who don't know the meaning of humor and are still good, so I won't go any farther.
Anyway, it's really a good book, an excellent approach to the history of violence and revenge with a fluid and compelling style. And Énard is a master when it gets to glue different stories in a perfect patchwork. I recommend it.
March 23, 2012
I gave it a try, and to be fair I'm often reading upwards of four books at a time so it wasn't as if I threw myself into it. But there's a basic skill for storytelling that, four chapters in, Enard just doesn't seem to have. At first I wondered if it was me; to a certain extent, the style is compelling, the atmosphere strong, but gradually it becomes clear what is missing. Never does he linger on a scene. Everything's a whirl. Cut, cut, cut. And while this may seem impressive on the surface I question if it will ever take me deeper. Nor do I find the 'one sentence' ruse convincing - it really is as if he's gone through afterwards and taken out the full-stops; sometimes it's that obvious where they should be. And while occasionally it works, at other times it seems more like camouflage for clumsy, plain or hackneyed prose. I gave up after Chapter 4 because that was where Enard dropped his ruse and told it straight (the novel-within-the-novel section), and boy, that was dire. Here's your chance, man: simple declarative prose, unity of time and setting, give us some old-fashioned drama! But nah, he just has the character polish her gun for 8 pages while trying to distract us with lines like 'The Palestinians have gloriously resisted the Israeli army. The resistance continues. The glorious fight for the liberation of Palestine continues... She goes on playing mechanically with the rifle.' Now OK, fair enough, Thomas Bernhard does this kind of thing all the time - has a character sit in a chair for a whole novel, in fact. But Bernhard never lowers himself to uttering such banal prose. Beckett does the same, but he's a master - his every sentence is a joy. Who was it that said we trust Picasso because we know he could draw like Ingres? And both Bernhard and Beckett are focussed; Enard seems very far from focussed.
I wanted to like this. I like secret agents with briefcases on train journeys. I like ranting monologues. And Enard is my contemporary - born a year earlier. But I guess it all seems too obvious a grab at high-literary status: the subject matter, the style, the humourlessness (again, not a feature of either Bernhard or Beckett). Maybe I'll give it another shot. Maybe it's just the disparity between the ridiculous statement on the cover ('novel of the decade, if not the century') and the text inside. But at first glance it's a pretty big disparity.
I wanted to like this. I like secret agents with briefcases on train journeys. I like ranting monologues. And Enard is my contemporary - born a year earlier. But I guess it all seems too obvious a grab at high-literary status: the subject matter, the style, the humourlessness (again, not a feature of either Bernhard or Beckett). Maybe I'll give it another shot. Maybe it's just the disparity between the ridiculous statement on the cover ('novel of the decade, if not the century') and the text inside. But at first glance it's a pretty big disparity.
October 18, 2019
Egy ex-zsoldos és kém Rómába vonatozván elmélázik kicsit � ennyi a történet. Belső monológ majd 600 oldalon � ez azért nem hangzik túl kecsegtetően. De Énard könyve jóval több ennél: bivalyerős irodalmi sűrítés, áthallások orgiája, ilyenformán igazi formai bravúr*, ami úgy mutatja be a Mediterráneum történetét, mint egyetlen összefüggő csatát Homérosztól egészen napjaink terroristáiig, mindezt egyetlen Párizs-Róma vonatút időtartamába bepréselve. Nem is regény: eposz hóhérok és áldozatok végtelenített láncolatáról, aminek a fehér sziklák és a fájdalmasan kék tenger adnak kontrasztot. A Zóna úgy képes megragadni a háborút, ahogy talán senki: a férfiak szemszögéből, akik lehetnek görögök, spanyolok, nácik, oszmánok, szerbek, horvátok, algériaiak, izraeliek vagy palesztinok � a lényeg, hogy sosem fogynak el, amíg akad elég gyűlölet, bosszúvágy vagy harci düh, amivel táplálni lehet a szörnyet. Egy tőről fakadnak mind, csordába verődve falvakat gyújtanak fel és nőket erőszakolnak meg, bronzkardot lóbálnak vagy RPG-t, mindegy is � büszke férfiak, „fényeslábvértű akhájok�, ragadozók, akik szégyellik, ha látszik a lelkük. Ragadozók � dehogy. Valójában paraziták.
Nagy kaliberű regény. Belemegy az emberbe, és nem hagyja békén.
* Talán tanácsos volna elhallgatni, hogy a „formai bravúr� alatt bizony 30-40 oldalas egybefüggő mondatokat tessék érteni. De ez ne rettentsen vissza senkit, mert maga a téma olyan szuggesztív, hogy az ember nemsokára észre sem veszi ezt a mellékkörülményt. És nem kis részben pont azért szuggesztív az a téma, mert a monstre mondatláncolatok megerősítik bennünk az érzést, hogy az események láncolatából nincs menekvés, nincs egy új bekezdés, egy sortörés, de még egy pont sem, ahol szusszanhatnánk egyet.
Nagy kaliberű regény. Belemegy az emberbe, és nem hagyja békén.
* Talán tanácsos volna elhallgatni, hogy a „formai bravúr� alatt bizony 30-40 oldalas egybefüggő mondatokat tessék érteni. De ez ne rettentsen vissza senkit, mert maga a téma olyan szuggesztív, hogy az ember nemsokára észre sem veszi ezt a mellékkörülményt. És nem kis részben pont azért szuggesztív az a téma, mert a monstre mondatláncolatok megerősítik bennünk az érzést, hogy az események láncolatából nincs menekvés, nincs egy új bekezdés, egy sortörés, de még egy pont sem, ahol szusszanhatnánk egyet.
April 13, 2022
Opera notevole e per quanto mi riguarda impegnativa.
La scrittura mi è piaciuta parecchio, un flusso di coscienza ininterrotto di ben 400 pagine che si lasciano leggere anche agevolmente, non fosse per l'infinità di rimandi storici, molti dei quali non conoscevo minimamente, quindi ci si deve mettere lì con buona volontà e un telefono a portata di mano per recuperare diverse informazioni.
È un romanzo "nero" che parla del cuore oscuro del Mediterraneo, la famosa Zona dove ha operato il nostro protagonista, le guerre e gli intrighi politici che hanno insanguinato le coste di tanti paesi dal secolo scorso fino ad oggi.
Tutto molto bello e interessante, ma ho faticato... Forse un lettore con una base culturale più ampia della mia può trarne un piacere ben maggiore durante la lettura.
Vuoi che mettiamo al mondo dei figli che vivranno in miseri campi profughi sotto le granate dei falangisti? Lei nei figli vedeva la speranza. Per lui la speranza era combattere. Lottare.
Tutto è più difficile nell'età adulta, tutto suona più falso, ma a volte gli dèi ti regalano lampi di lucidità, istanti in cui contempli tutto l'universo, la ruota infinita dei mondi, ti vedi, dall'alto, per pochi attimi davvero prima di ripartire scagliato verso il seguito, verso la fine
La scrittura mi è piaciuta parecchio, un flusso di coscienza ininterrotto di ben 400 pagine che si lasciano leggere anche agevolmente, non fosse per l'infinità di rimandi storici, molti dei quali non conoscevo minimamente, quindi ci si deve mettere lì con buona volontà e un telefono a portata di mano per recuperare diverse informazioni.
È un romanzo "nero" che parla del cuore oscuro del Mediterraneo, la famosa Zona dove ha operato il nostro protagonista, le guerre e gli intrighi politici che hanno insanguinato le coste di tanti paesi dal secolo scorso fino ad oggi.
Tutto molto bello e interessante, ma ho faticato... Forse un lettore con una base culturale più ampia della mia può trarne un piacere ben maggiore durante la lettura.
Vuoi che mettiamo al mondo dei figli che vivranno in miseri campi profughi sotto le granate dei falangisti? Lei nei figli vedeva la speranza. Per lui la speranza era combattere. Lottare.
Tutto è più difficile nell'età adulta, tutto suona più falso, ma a volte gli dèi ti regalano lampi di lucidità, istanti in cui contempli tutto l'universo, la ruota infinita dei mondi, ti vedi, dall'alto, per pochi attimi davvero prima di ripartire scagliato verso il seguito, verso la fine
December 6, 2011
Zone is a remarkable book. The premise of the whole thing will seem like an almost eye-rolling cliche, a jaded intelligence operative is on a train from Milan to Rome to sell a handcuffed suitcase full of intelligence secrets before he leaves the spy business forever. That train ride is all that 'happens,' conventionally speaking. But the torrent of memories, historical facts, and nightmarish complicities that unfold in an unstoppable bum-rush from his head is as delerious and sweeping as almost anything I've ever read. Like W.G. sebald, Enard is interested in worming down into the bizarre resonances of history, by showing the cross linkages between cycles of destruction, war, and erasure. Yet unlike Sebald, whose work is so grounded by specific geographic locales and his photo-montages, Enard just flows ever outward, sucking more and more of the world through the exhausted, haunted mind of his protagonist. Zone is a total book. It tries to incorporate the whole history of Europe, Northern Africa, the Near Middle East, any place that in any way touches the Mediterranean basin gets pulled in. The range of references to literature and to (at least for a young american) obscurant, often monstrous geopolitical issues in this book is overwhelming. And I do mean overwhelming. Almost every page had me running to try and find a map of croatia or some information about a forgotten turkish war hero, or a minor bosnian war criminal, or trying to tease apart some weird reference to the battle of troy. Yet for it's deluge of erudition, the book never feels like it's just an intellectual dick measuring contest the way that a lot of sprawling high modernist stuff is. Enard filters whole civilizations through a whirlwind of run-on consciousness, not merely to show off intellectually, but to try and find traces of the endless volume of shadow lives and shadow histories that are what secretly support the conventional historical narratives that we all live in and reckon with. Zone is a book about moving forward, both in space and in time, about being shackled to history and how that, paradoxically, can make us free.
June 13, 2015
تيار وعي على أبوه، ولا مرة ممكن تسرح بعيد أو تمل من الكلام المتدفق الغزير، هاتكمل للنهاية وهاتبقى مستغرب إزاي الكاتب عمل كدا؟ مش كل الناس هاتستمتع بيها بالتأكيد، لكن ضروري جدا الاطلاع عليها.
May 3, 2011
* Jan 13, 2011 01:35pm
One sentence, 608 pages.
Translated from the french.
Looks like a love-it-or-hate-it if ever there was one.
à l'avant!
* Mar 03, 2011 10:51pm
Okay, page 119, lots of commas, lots of derivative history (20th cent EU history somehow always being mirrored by the greeks, and classicalism gone viral & rampant).. (Alright, the guy is a professor. Fine. I'm an electrician and I don't spend all day explaining ohm's law, do I ...)
Well, so far, at least I'm on the same freeway, but it's bloated and gridlocked. This is like an enormous James Michener novel, as told by Thomas Pynchon. Which actually sounds good at first blush, but, seriously : the master of the pre-fab potboiler, as retold by the notorious crackpotted prefabricator ?
Choppy seas, here in zone land.
* Mar 08, 2011 08:15am
Devolving to the old cat-and-mouse as we go. Tom & Jerry's European Vacation it isn't, but a turn for the cartoonish.
* Mar 13, 2011 10:50pm
All settled in, I get it, it's one sentence for the whole thing, really, just like they said. The occasional colon or semicolon is a jolt, a real thunderbolt in the flowy flow here. Just waiting to see if this conglomeration can open up, breathe, start to impart a world of .... stuff.
* Mar 23, 2011 01:29pm
Pg 303, hiatus in the Zone.
Due no doubt to the unceasing public demand for 5oo-pg/sgl-sentence experimental novels, the library won't renew my book. So back to the LAPL and will resume when a new hold brings it back around. One sentence can be a lifetime ...
* Apr 01, 2011 08:51pm
Zone update: New hold on LAPL copy reports that the entire metro-library system has only the one copy so I'll have to wait till that comes around. I'm actually reading none of the books here at the moment. But I'm reading : a play by Camus, some short fiction from an anthology... one each from Joyce, Conrad, Nabokov, Borges, Kipling and two by Frank O'Connor. A wealth of treats from a free book. Which I've since set free to find another reader. Back to Monsieur Camus, and his crazy bleak thing that he does ....
* Apr 06, 2011 03:03pm
Zone queue position at LAPL is 1.
So at most another couple weeks till I get back to that ... sentence. In the meantime, more alacarte selections from my own books. Then a major project put off for too many years. No, not Finnegan's Wake.
It's never really time for Finnegan's Wake, is it...
* Apr 13, 2011 09:09am
Just finishing up a John le Carré
(set in the Panama Canal Zone, where denizens are curiously called "zonians" ..) before returning to the Énard Zone again. Lapl has delivered.
* Apr 25, 2011 07:14pm
Pg 424, hmm; a book that takes you so long to read that you read numerous others before finishing it. Zone re-entry now complete and I can almost hear the theme music fading back in for the finale ...
* Apr 28, 2011 09:11pm
Pg 468 my Zone haiku
...
Long way down short path.
Many clauses, however:
Unnecessary.
* May 03, 2011, 9:51am
And it was, in the end. A wobbly chunk of experimental fiction that in my view is a lot of arty travel notes, collated from various vacations, pimped up with stabs of faux drama.
Abrupt stops, starts, stops that don't stop, fits of energy and then lagging doldrums. Jolting transistions from a few, repeated, zones: from Memory to Present to Hypothetical and around and around again. You do get the impression that if you had mistakenly turned two pages instead of one, that it wouldn't change anything and it wouldn't matter.
This is like being stuck on a long jet-flight with your least-favorite college history professor, who unfortunately just had a triple-double espresso in the terminal. Categories & pace are scrambled, each jolt in the ride brings a change of frame, a shift to a reminiscence, a list of related corollaries and then back to the vast crossword puzzles of history ... Unfortunate, too, with occasional flashes of interest, as in the Cyprus, Rhodes, Salonika and Corfu sequences.
The way that the single-sentence approach creates an unceasing sense of expectancy-- eventually just clots into complacency, a sense that no immediate conclusions + no foreseeable conclusions = no conclusions.
I'm not averse to any of the above, properly done, (cf, Vladimir Nabokov), and I really just stuck with the book to see if Monsieur Énard could turn the trick, let us feel that there is some breath of life, a heartbeat, in all the subtext. That he couldn't, and didn't, wasn't the worst part of all this. The violent and gratuitous rape scene, three-quarters of the way into the Zone, was what shut off the life-support, and put this in the Dumpster category for me.
One sentence, 608 pages.
Translated from the french.
Looks like a love-it-or-hate-it if ever there was one.
à l'avant!
* Mar 03, 2011 10:51pm
Okay, page 119, lots of commas, lots of derivative history (20th cent EU history somehow always being mirrored by the greeks, and classicalism gone viral & rampant).. (Alright, the guy is a professor. Fine. I'm an electrician and I don't spend all day explaining ohm's law, do I ...)
Well, so far, at least I'm on the same freeway, but it's bloated and gridlocked. This is like an enormous James Michener novel, as told by Thomas Pynchon. Which actually sounds good at first blush, but, seriously : the master of the pre-fab potboiler, as retold by the notorious crackpotted prefabricator ?
Choppy seas, here in zone land.
* Mar 08, 2011 08:15am
Devolving to the old cat-and-mouse as we go. Tom & Jerry's European Vacation it isn't, but a turn for the cartoonish.
* Mar 13, 2011 10:50pm
All settled in, I get it, it's one sentence for the whole thing, really, just like they said. The occasional colon or semicolon is a jolt, a real thunderbolt in the flowy flow here. Just waiting to see if this conglomeration can open up, breathe, start to impart a world of .... stuff.
* Mar 23, 2011 01:29pm
Pg 303, hiatus in the Zone.
Due no doubt to the unceasing public demand for 5oo-pg/sgl-sentence experimental novels, the library won't renew my book. So back to the LAPL and will resume when a new hold brings it back around. One sentence can be a lifetime ...
* Apr 01, 2011 08:51pm
Zone update: New hold on LAPL copy reports that the entire metro-library system has only the one copy so I'll have to wait till that comes around. I'm actually reading none of the books here at the moment. But I'm reading : a play by Camus, some short fiction from an anthology... one each from Joyce, Conrad, Nabokov, Borges, Kipling and two by Frank O'Connor. A wealth of treats from a free book. Which I've since set free to find another reader. Back to Monsieur Camus, and his crazy bleak thing that he does ....
* Apr 06, 2011 03:03pm
Zone queue position at LAPL is 1.
So at most another couple weeks till I get back to that ... sentence. In the meantime, more alacarte selections from my own books. Then a major project put off for too many years. No, not Finnegan's Wake.
It's never really time for Finnegan's Wake, is it...
* Apr 13, 2011 09:09am
Just finishing up a John le Carré
(set in the Panama Canal Zone, where denizens are curiously called "zonians" ..) before returning to the Énard Zone again. Lapl has delivered.
* Apr 25, 2011 07:14pm
Pg 424, hmm; a book that takes you so long to read that you read numerous others before finishing it. Zone re-entry now complete and I can almost hear the theme music fading back in for the finale ...
* Apr 28, 2011 09:11pm
Pg 468 my Zone haiku
...
Long way down short path.
Many clauses, however:
Unnecessary.
* May 03, 2011, 9:51am
And it was, in the end. A wobbly chunk of experimental fiction that in my view is a lot of arty travel notes, collated from various vacations, pimped up with stabs of faux drama.
Abrupt stops, starts, stops that don't stop, fits of energy and then lagging doldrums. Jolting transistions from a few, repeated, zones: from Memory to Present to Hypothetical and around and around again. You do get the impression that if you had mistakenly turned two pages instead of one, that it wouldn't change anything and it wouldn't matter.
This is like being stuck on a long jet-flight with your least-favorite college history professor, who unfortunately just had a triple-double espresso in the terminal. Categories & pace are scrambled, each jolt in the ride brings a change of frame, a shift to a reminiscence, a list of related corollaries and then back to the vast crossword puzzles of history ... Unfortunate, too, with occasional flashes of interest, as in the Cyprus, Rhodes, Salonika and Corfu sequences.
The way that the single-sentence approach creates an unceasing sense of expectancy-- eventually just clots into complacency, a sense that no immediate conclusions + no foreseeable conclusions = no conclusions.
I'm not averse to any of the above, properly done, (cf, Vladimir Nabokov), and I really just stuck with the book to see if Monsieur Énard could turn the trick, let us feel that there is some breath of life, a heartbeat, in all the subtext. That he couldn't, and didn't, wasn't the worst part of all this. The violent and gratuitous rape scene, three-quarters of the way into the Zone, was what shut off the life-support, and put this in the Dumpster category for me.
January 7, 2011
This book is amazing. Enard's prose is hypnotic, insightful, and bold in its unconventional presentation. The story that he tells weaves together a vast amount of the history behind numerous wars (such as those in Yugoslavia, the Gaza strip, Algeria, etc) that have rolled across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for centuries - all told through the voice of a man who is obsessed with these obsessive wars. In fact, if I had to describe this book in a few words, I would say this: it is obsessed with war - and stunning in its effect.
This is one of those books that comes along only infrequently in one's life, surprising you with its temerity and its skillful presentation, needling your parts of your insides that you, heretofore, did not know were so sensitive - nor so thirsty for poetic expression. Since starting it, I have thought about it constantly; and upon reading the final sentence, I experienced a shock that is still resonating through my organism. Put even more succinctly: I fucking love this book.
This is one of those books that comes along only infrequently in one's life, surprising you with its temerity and its skillful presentation, needling your parts of your insides that you, heretofore, did not know were so sensitive - nor so thirsty for poetic expression. Since starting it, I have thought about it constantly; and upon reading the final sentence, I experienced a shock that is still resonating through my organism. Put even more succinctly: I fucking love this book.
October 28, 2021
Schwer zu fassen aber genial!
August 8, 2024
Hands down a masterpiece. A former combatant in the Yugoslav war gets a train across Europe, where his own war crimes mingle with the crimes of European, North African & Middle Eastern history.
February 19, 2017
A spy (or political operative) who had been working the “Zone� (an area that seems to incorporate counties on the Mediterranean in Europe and Africa) for 30 or so years is traveling south through Italy on a train. He is carrying a suitcase with names and sensitive information for buyers at the Vatican. He will be well paid for this. After delivery he plans to change his identity and retire. On this train trip he reminisces about his long and eventful career.
Most of the book is one long sentence. There are a few eye-friendly chapters that tell the story of a book he is reading, the high drama of which parallels the high drama of his own life.
The stream of consciousness narrative is loaded with atrocities. Almost every page has a reference to cruelty, death, starvation, assassination, and/or the miserable condition of refugees, captives and other survivors. Even his art and literary references are grim: Caravaggio’s decapitation painting, Burroughs killing his wife and Lowry choking his. There are some tame (among the bloody) references to ancient history and classical literature, some quite subtle (“grey-fingered dawn�).
The story spans decades; it sometimes goes back centuries. I got the most out of this book when he was recounting his experience of history I understood. Not knowing much about Croatia and the Balkan wars, I was in the dark a lot.
The narrator, Francis, soon to be Yvan, gives short capsules of his personal life. The portrait of his mother is the best drawn character. Girlfriend, Stephanie, is described as he sees her (she would have to be more complex than the portrait he paints). There are other women, and, because he is sharing everything seedy, there are whore houses. He has a noted proclivity towards alcoholism. The attitude is “seen it all�.
The book has received a lot of recognition, and a few awards. I found it difficult and at times tedious. I recognize the knowledge a writer must have to create such a work (two stars for scope) but I found little enjoyment in it. If I hadn’t received this book as a gift, I’d never have finished it.
Most of the book is one long sentence. There are a few eye-friendly chapters that tell the story of a book he is reading, the high drama of which parallels the high drama of his own life.
The stream of consciousness narrative is loaded with atrocities. Almost every page has a reference to cruelty, death, starvation, assassination, and/or the miserable condition of refugees, captives and other survivors. Even his art and literary references are grim: Caravaggio’s decapitation painting, Burroughs killing his wife and Lowry choking his. There are some tame (among the bloody) references to ancient history and classical literature, some quite subtle (“grey-fingered dawn�).
The story spans decades; it sometimes goes back centuries. I got the most out of this book when he was recounting his experience of history I understood. Not knowing much about Croatia and the Balkan wars, I was in the dark a lot.
The narrator, Francis, soon to be Yvan, gives short capsules of his personal life. The portrait of his mother is the best drawn character. Girlfriend, Stephanie, is described as he sees her (she would have to be more complex than the portrait he paints). There are other women, and, because he is sharing everything seedy, there are whore houses. He has a noted proclivity towards alcoholism. The attitude is “seen it all�.
The book has received a lot of recognition, and a few awards. I found it difficult and at times tedious. I recognize the knowledge a writer must have to create such a work (two stars for scope) but I found little enjoyment in it. If I hadn’t received this book as a gift, I’d never have finished it.
April 18, 2016
I liked this book enormously -- let me make just two points --
1.) the one sentence is something of a gimmick, since the clauses introduce natural pauses -- and the model is the late Céline with the three-dots (which Céline himself said was just a gimmick) simply omitted. Céline, of course, is one of the authors that Énard openly discusses.
2.) The second point should have cost the book a half-a-star (if I hadn't liked it so...). And that is that
A minor complaint, though it bothered me.
1.) the one sentence is something of a gimmick, since the clauses introduce natural pauses -- and the model is the late Céline with the three-dots (which Céline himself said was just a gimmick) simply omitted. Céline, of course, is one of the authors that Énard openly discusses.
2.) The second point should have cost the book a half-a-star (if I hadn't liked it so...). And that is that
A minor complaint, though it bothered me.
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