Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world
Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.
With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources―nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie―and binds them together in a most magical way.

Compass

Literature & Fiction

Énard, Mathias

Literary

New Directions

Financial Times Book of the Year
An adventure of Michelangelo in Constantinople from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass
In 1506, Michelangelo―a young but already renowned sculptor―is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design had been rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.”
Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II―whose commission he leaves unfinished―and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants―constructed from real historical fragments―is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Michelangelo’s adventure in Constantinople, from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass
In 1506, Michelangelo―a young but already renowned sculptor―is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, along with an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.” Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II―whose commission he leaves unfinished―and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants―constructed from real historical fragments―is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched fragments, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn't yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language. Brimming with Mathias Ã%nard's characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess. Â&nbsp;

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

Genre Fiction

The Deserters

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, Orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, COMPASS is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out - like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard's most ambitious novel since ZONE.

Fitzcarraldo Editions

"The novel of the decade, if not of the century."—Christophe Claro
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.
Mathias Énard has won numerous prizes for his works, including the the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre for his novel Zone. He is currently a professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona. Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Enard's Zone. Brian Evenson is a translator from French and the author of ten books of fiction, including The Open Curtain, which was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award.

Zone

Open Letter

"A tremendous accomplishment. . . . Énard's Zone is, in short, one of the best books of the year"—Daily Beast
Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.
Lakhdar's transformations—from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner—take place against some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.
If all of that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend—one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes. A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Énard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in contemporary novelists. This book may even suprpass Énard's earlier work, Zone, which Christophe Claro boldly declared to be "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."
Mathias 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.
Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Énard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.

Street of Thieves

J'y mets ma langue à couper

Reference

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Books by Énard, Mathias

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Énard, Mathias. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Compass

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Compass

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

The Deserters

Compass

Zone

Street of Thieves

J'y mets ma langue à couper