Mathias Enard

His Zone is considered by some to be the most ambitious novel to be published in France this year. Proust, Celine, Joyce and The Iliad are mentioned as the inspirations behind it. According to the editor's description at amazon.fr the novel features such characters as Genet, Pound, Burroughs, Cervantes, Hannibal, and Napoleon.

http://livres.fluctuat.net/mathias-enard/l...de-vitesse.html

http://www.amazon.fr/Zone-Mathias-Enard/dp/2742777059


Kudos to Fausto for bringing him up on another forum.

I hope to be reading it in the next couple of weeks. Having a quick look at it, you can forget about Joyce. Proust would be for the scarcity of final dots (sentences are very long). The Iliad is definitely a reference.

I may as well repost here what I posted there:

Mathias Énard teaches arabic in one of the universities of Barcelona. He also knows persian and translates texts from both languages. His new novel, Zone, is his fourth. A man on a train to Rome launches himself in a long monologue on war in the mediterranean. A modern day Iliad seems to be the aim. Probably a tad pretentious, but I know a couple of people who have read it and they say it's fantastic. Some people think it will be the surprise success of the year, but I still doubt it. A lot of press article mention that the book is a 300 pages sentence, which has to be lazy journalism as browsing through it the other day I fell on many final dots. Anyway...

I now know 5 persons who read it. 4 say its great, the last one found it really poorly written and quite bad overall. I trust the judgement of whole five, problem is I tend to have opinions closer to the one who didn't like it. Should know this time next week...

Tatz, I finished the book yesterday.

Some ride, some ride. It has faults, some more annoying than other, but it's a good book, a very good book. And I think it's the sort of book that stays in the back of your mind for quite a while.

A man in his late thirties is aboard a train from Milan to Rome with a single suitcase filled up with documents and names coming from his years long investigation into the gruesome history of conflicts of the middeteranean. 500 kilometers travel, 500 pages. During the whole trip, we are inside the man's head. Thinking about his suitcase. Thinking about history, thinking about his own life, his years as a soldier in the croatian nationalist army in the 90's, the war against the Serbian and the muslim Bosnian, massacres, rapes, warfare. Thinking also about is second life, in France's intelligence service. His investigation in Algeria during the bloody 90's, years of the rippers, his time in war-torn Lebanon. This is a list of horrors, a century of violence. The narrator's voice is haunted, it never stops -- the first dot of his own narration (save the ones found in the book he is reading) is the final one. A very striking book who'd wish to be a modern's day Iliad -- everything started in Troy.

I have some reservations about what I perceive to be some logic issues regarding some of the outlook of the character, but it's minor. I've got more issues with the writing. Some people love it, but I found that the whole "one 500 pages long sentence" set-up was detrimental to the book. I understand why Enard wanted to do it, I'm just not sure he did it as well as he wanted too. Some brilliant passages, true, but a lot of not so good stuff. Also, Enard makes a heavy use of metaphors and I tend to think too many metaphors kill the metaphors.

Still, I have little doubt this will be one of if not the best French novel of the year.

That's nice, I see more positive reviews of the novel than negative ones. I might also get my hands on it. Claro also gave it thumbs up of sorts. Hopefully, there will be something posted on Tabula Rasa as well

The novel sounds awesome, although I agree that the one-sentence thing is very hard to pull off. Actually I'm struggling to think of any time it's ever been pulled off.

What's Tabula Rasa?

It's Fausto's blog. (Fausto, cover your ears) One of the best French language literary blogs by the way.

http://table-rase.blogspot.com/

http://quarterlyconversation.com/zone-by-mathias-enard

If any of you read my piece (linked above) for TQC, I'd advise you to have another look at it. Some of the edits I wasn't happy with and it has now been corrected.

I didn;t read the whoel thing, Fausto
but tripped right over to Auto-fission instead

you should have a link to your fiction blog
someplace prominent hereabouts . . .

It's more or less dead at the moment, so no new texts to expect soon.