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“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 The Illiad, 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 War and Peace. 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 Tolstoy, 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��

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