Mathias Enard
Story Stream
The Time of Return May 20, 2025
On or about February 2025, the twentieth century ended. Rarely does the beginning or close of an epoch align precisely with its calendar dates; it takes time for the years to settle into the exact note, the timbre, of what is to come. When Virginia W...
At Mathias Énard’s Table March 26, 2024
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 Par...
The Novelist as Information Machine February 27, 2024
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle s...
