The French novelist Mathias Énard sets his obsessive characters within the high contrast of a cultural or political confusion. The much-lauded Zone (2008)—written as a single, 150,000-word sentence—inhabits the mind of Francis Servain Mirkovic, a Parisian spy selling a grisly dossier of Mediterranean violence to a representative from the Vatican. Compass, winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, centers on the Austrian musicologist Franz Ritter, who spends an insomniac vigil recounting his academic career as a postcolonial Orientalist. These avatars navigate a fluid cultural history in which influence, atrocity, and appreciation maintain an uneasy equilibrium. Whether parsing sectarian violence, predatory globalism, artistic hybridity, or revolutionary fallout, Énard offers a vision of modern life—and the modern novel—as a pattern of disclosure partially obscured by complex and nonlinear histories.
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