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Now on the outstanding longlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses.

In Germany they impose the Scriptures on you in the back of the bedside table drawer, in Muslim countries they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose marking the direction of Mecca on the desk, compass and wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabian Penisula, but also, if you're so inclined, Rome, Vienna or Moscow: you're never lost in these lands. I even saw some prayer rugs with a little compass woven into them, carpets you immediately wanted to set flying, since they were so prepared for aerial navigation.

Matthias Enard's Compass, translated, like his wonderful novel Zone, by the highly accomplished Charlotte Mendel, is a novel dedicated to, inter alia, "The Circle of Melancholy Orientalists" and the Syrian people.

The book consists of the recollections and stream of associations, during one insomnia filled night in Vienna, by Frank Ritter, a musicologist specialising in the influence of the oriental on Western Music.

I've shown that the revolution in music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed everything to the Orient, that it was not a matter of 'exotic procedures' as thought before, this exoticism had a meaning, that it made external elements, alterity, enter, it was a large movement and gathered together, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Berlioz, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Bartok, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Szymanowski,, hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe, all over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to barstardize it, for genius wants barstardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony, why am I getting worked up all alone on my pillow now, probably because I'm a poor academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about. No one is interested any more in Felicien David who became extraordinarily famous on 8 December 1844 after the premiere of Le Desert.

Franz has just received an, albeit unconfirmed, diagnosis that he is suffering from a (unspecified in the novel) degenerative and ultimately fatal condition, prompting his night of reflection, particularly on his unconsummated relationship with Sarah, whose PhD thesis kicks off his memories and thoughts. It began:

There are certain wounds in life that, like leprosy, eat away at the soul and diminish it," writes the Iranian Sadegh Hedayat at the beginning of his novel The Blind Owl; the little man with round glasses knew this better than anyone.

And he reflects:

Today as I reread the beginning of this text, I must admit there was something strong and innovative in these four hundred pages on the images and representations of the Orient, non-places, utopias, ideological fantasies in which many who wanted to travel had got lost: the bodies of artists, poets and travellers who have tried to explore them were pushed little by little towards destruction; illusion as Hedayat said, ate away at the soul in solitude - what had long been called madness, melancholy, depression was often the result of friction, a loss of self in creation, in contact with alterity.

This concept of alterity is crucial to the novel. Franz's thoughts take us widely through the history of music, literature, archaeology and those Westerners who embraced the East. But he is equally aware that one can only really become the other if one erases oneself:

When Chateaubriand invented travel literature with his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem in 1811, long before Stendhal and his Memoirs of an Egotist, more or less the same time as the publication of Goethe's Italian journey, Chateaubriand was spying for the sake of art; he was certainly no longer the explorer who spied for science or for the army: he spied mainly for literature. Art has its spies, just as history or the natural sciences have theirs. Archaeology is a form of espionage, botany, poetry as well; ethnomusicologists are spies of music. Spies are travellers, travellers are spies. 'Don't trust the stories of travellers,' says Saadi in The Gulistan. They see nothing. They think they see, but they observe only reflections. We are prisoners of images, of representations, Sarah would say, and only those who, like her or the peddler, choose to rid themselves of their lives (if such a thing is possible) can reach the other.

A contemporary note is sounded by the his contrasting his own experience in Syria to what he sees in the news today, as the country is caught between the forces of the Syrian state and the Islamic State for example reflecting on a visit on the 1990s to the Baron Hotel in Aleppo:

In the evening as the day faded the bar filled up not only with hotel clients, but also with tourists staying elsewhere coming to soak in the nostalgia, drinking a beer or an arak whose smell of anise, mixed with that of peanuts and cigarettes, was the only Oriental touch on the decor.
[...]
This Baron Hotel that still reeked of nostalgia and decadence, just as today it reeks of bombs and death.
[...]
Impossible at that time, at the bar of the Baron Hotel, to foresee the civil war that was about to seize hold of Syria, even if the violence of dictatorship was omnipresent, so present that you'd rather forget it, for there was a certain comfort that foreigners found in police regimes, a muffled, silent peace from Deraa to Qamisilhi, from Kassab to Quneytra, a peace humming with suppressed hatred and fates bending under a yoke to which all the foreign scholars willingly accommodated, the archaeologists, the linguists, the historians, the geographers, the political scientists, they all enjoyed the leaden calm of Damascus or Aleppo, and we did too, Sarah and I, reading the letters from Annemarie Schwarzenbach the inconsolable Angeline in the bar of the Baron Hotel, eating white-coated pumpkin seeds and long, narrow, pistachios with light brown shells, we were enjoying the calm of the Syria of Hafez-el-Hassad, the father of the nation.

This is a novel full of what the publishers blurb describes, accurately, as "generous erudition." This isn't research gleaned from Wikipedia or indeed a book that requires frequent use of Wikipedia to follow it, although the reader, should he or she so choose, can follow up on the many fascinating references to novels, music and fascinating characters such as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Marga d'Andurian.

I couldn't help but draw the contrast to last year's deeply unimpressive Man Booker winner and this is the very type of novel that makes me prefer the Man Booker International variant. One for the shortlist and a contender for the overall prize.