Mathias Énard
Compass
Editions and / or, 418 pages, 19 euros
The great novelists still exist, capable of vast and necessary cognitive and narrative endeavors. One of them is the Vietnamese now in the US Viet Thanh Nguyen, and we will be back. Another is Énard, a Frenchman now in Spain, greedy explorer of stories and author with Compass (2015 Goncourt Prize) of an impressive “orientalist” excursus (in the wake of Edward Said) that invents and tells, teaches and entertains.
Between east and west, between here and there, through places and systems and feeding on history and culture, on stories. The wire? A Viennese who knows about music, seriously ill, thinks about his travels and his love with a young French orientalist. And the sweet, evoked comment of a is not casual lied by Schubert. Known or unknown names and things, dating after dating, good stories alongside bad stories.
Énard began with short, concentric novels (The perfection of the shot, Edizioni and / or) but this “open work” remains a unique enterprise in its own way, which fascinates for its story and even more for the knowledge of the history and culture of several countries, for the comparison it proposes between us and one of them closer today, in ways that are not easy, also thanks to our travels (for pleasure or science) and theirs, of other pain and effort. And thanks to our readings. And knowledge and imagination, even in excess, never tire.
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