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Francis Servain Mirkovic is a troubled French-Croat intelligence analyst on a path of self-destruction. He's on a train to Rome, ready to sell a fat portfolio on war crimes to the Vatican—war crimes including those committed by himself during the Croatian War of Independence. Francis is a quirky character, and for most of the novel's length, the reader is subjected to his frantic stream of consciousness. 500-odd pages of personal digressions, historical anecdotes and classical mythology, all focused on the complex history of war in the Mediterranean, produces a unique blend, approximating at times the god's eye outlook of W.G. Sebald mixed with the obsessive repetitions of Thomas Bernhard. Unfortunately, I remained almost totally unconvinced of the reality of the character, whose lack of self-awareness became the critical prism by which I viewed the author's audacious, but ultimately superficial gambit. The frenzied, borderline ADHD style leaps between hundreds of topics, often tangentially related to the cities he's passing through on his train to Rome. Unlike W.G. Sebald, however, the connections often feel unmotivated by the character's present-tense situation—the stops along his route lack a sense of cumulative power and transcendent insight. And while I feel like that is part of the author, Mathias Enard's commentary on the character, the banal dourness of the story plays almost entirely in one tempo, with no sense of dynamic or tonal shifts. And unlike the work of Thomas Bernhard, there's little sense of ironic self-awareness of the character's mania to give additional texture to the reading experience. That said, perhaps because of the story's relative simple-mindedness, it's not at all the challenging read one might expect of a novel composed of a so-called single, run on sentence.

That said, the novel's questionable aesthetic choice is not its greatest flaw: it's the impression I have, as a reader, that Enard lacks the life experience and psychological depth to sell me on this particular character. The most believable moments in the books are all centered around boozing and tourist activities. Simple, commonplace elements. The most unbelievable moments, however, are critical—the war scenes, the soldierly camaraderie, the moments of trauma, the memories intended to unlock Francis Servain Mirkovic as a character, often lack a feeling of psychological intimacy. Has Mathias Enard lived a rough life? Does he understand the nature of post traumatic stress disorder? It feels doubtful. Francis comes across as deeply privileged. A fake. Because of this fundamental flaw, Mirkovic as a character fades from the text, leaving only an empty avatar for the author's travel stories, historical trivia and thoughts on classical mythology.

I almost forgot to mention the story-within-the story. While on the train to Rome, Francis is reading a novella about the war in Beirut, and at three different points in "Zone", Francis' single, run-on sentence is interrupted by extracts from this novel... and honestly, it's pretty terrible. The Beirut story, written in a more conventional style (with periods, commas and paragraph breaks) is only superficially differentiated from the broader work, and the story it tells is regrettably banal and unenlightening. At times, this Beirut novella-within-the novel also seems in danger of slipping into the hyperactive voice characteristic of the rest of the book.

All this aside, I found it very intriguing that Mathias Enard would dare to write such a modernist-esque novel. It's not great, and the translation is quite dry, but at the same time the reading difficulty and time commitment was quite low. I will probably take a chance on another one of his novels in the future.