Mathias Énard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell, Open Letter (Univ. of Nebraska, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (517p) ISBN 978-1-934824-26-9 Homeric in its scope and grandeur, remarkable in ...

Set between the 16th and 22nd centuries, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a work of political comedy, fixated on class, climate, food, wine, and the afterlife. Set between the 16th and ...

The novel begins conventionally enough. We are introduced to the rather petulant, yet self-mocking voice of our protagonist and hapless anthropologist, David Mazon, via the form of his "ethnographer’s ...

History blinks, sometimes at a big moment, sometimes at a small one. The loss is imperceptible centuries later, but in those forgotten moments, there can be experiences that echo through history.

The French novelist and polymath Mathias Enard turned heads west of the Channel when his 2015 novel "Compass" was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker International Prize; many of those heads promptly ...

Compass. By Mathias Enard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions; 464 pages $26.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £14.99. “THE East is a career,” wrote Disraeli in his novel “Tancred”. Lately, the ...

Mathias Enard’s first novel published in English, “Zone” (2010), takes the form of a 500-page-long sentence, the internal monologue of a French Croatian spy on a train to the Vatican to sell a trove ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

“The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild,” the first novel published by Mathias Énard since he won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2015 for “Compass,” is his second-longest novel, and you ...