With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from ‘the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.’ It’s a masterpiece.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, a breathtaking novel that grapples with the dangers of ideology and the aftermath of war
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness. He is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude, but a chance encounter with a civilian forces him to make a difficult decision. On September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference in honoring the East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist and a survivor of Buchenwald.
As these two narrative threads weave and develop, Matthias Énard's dazzling, erudite prose vividly illuminates the devastations of war. Brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell, The Deserters is a triumphant novel that balances the weight of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.
With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from ‘the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.’ It’s a masterpiece.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past…feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass, a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.)
In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey—Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of The Deserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.
— Dustin Illingsworth, The New York Times
A novel in counterpoint—Énard explores the role of the sciences in the past century’s horrors, even as he depicts an innate humanity in the bond between the soldier and the woman. In Charlotte Mandell’s translation from the French, the melding of themes is reproduced on the level of the language, which shifts from crisp scholarly exposition to vivid poetic fragments. Synthesizing so many ideas and styles is customary for this brilliant author; his formal skill and provocative intelligence remain well worth the encounter.
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.
— Kirkus
All of Énard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.
— Joshua Cohen, The New York Review of Books
Two seemingly unconnected narratives—one saturated with history, the other scrubbed of all historical referents—explore themes of trauma and loss in this formally inventive novel… Énard uses their contrasting textures to sometimes unsettling but ultimately revelatory effect.
— Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
A novelist of Europe’s real and imaginative frontiers, Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell.
— Nicholas Dames, Harper's
The Deserters relies on mathematics, but the content is literature. Both – form and content – are masterfully constructed.
.jpg){kind=link}