It is excessive and exhausting, a Gallic admixture of Philip Roth’s orificial obsessions, Edgar Allan Poe’s penchant for death, Thomas Pynchon’s songs and wordplay, and the shape-shifting and time-folding of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, all with a wink toward Boccaccio’s Decameron. If that sounds overwhelming, or like the literary equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, it is ... By the time I got to the last page, and the novel had taken an unexpected turn toward vilifying capitalism and environmental allegory...I was tired.
This is Énard at his best ... The novel mirrors itself, returning in reverse order through its narratives, revisiting their stylistic variety and rounding out their stories ... There is a sense of shared melancholy, the feeling of having arrived together at a journey’s end, though Mazon’s journey has happened mostly away from us, in the space between diary entries, while we were off on a much more fantastical, historical, existential and unabashedly unconventional trip.
A book drowned in wine and war and banquets and incest and pointless scholarship and bestiality and mire and grimy rural death ... Ambitious stuff, then. Sounds like improbable reading for pleasure, I grant you. But Énard is a writer of singular talent ... Here is the difficulty. This all sounds terrible. It sounds like a nightmare ... So how about this. Just buy it. Forget everything I’ve said.
Written in semi-rhyming, often archaic prose over eighty pages, and powered by Rabelaisian energy, it features a group of new characters who tell stories, eat, drink, trade barbs, debate the entry of women to the guild, eat more and engage in theological arguments about death. It is a virtuosic set piece ... Can be considered encyclopedic in a different sense from the one meant by Calvino. With its lengthy retelling of episodes from the region’s history, its detailed depictions of the physical landscape, shifting seasons, flora, fauna and the region’s agricultural quirks – cows used to be transported by boat to pasture – this is a compendium of knowledge about a single subject, a billet-doux to Deux-Sèvres. But while it contains passages of interest, the overall result will be a trifle baffling to anyone who does not share those tender feelings.
Magnificent ... The narrative slips from medieval romance to modern murder, with the tale of the hamlet being told through the shifting shapes of its inhabitants who effortlessly change from stone to oak to bandit to raven to priest to boar, in Enard’s breathlessly inventive prose ... Leaves us hungry for more.
A long love letter to the Deux-Sèvres ... Énard is wickedly, brilliantly, subversive of sanctity ... Magnificent ... Despite its macabre title and subject matter, this novel is a capacious celebration of life, love and language.
Unruly ... Énard’s writing on history and culture is often moving and beautiful, but it can also be exhausting—he goes on at great length about the various eras previously inhabited by the characters. It’s a relief when the novel returns to David’s own microcosmic adventure, as Énard tactfully and charmingly describes the hapless and patronizing city boy’s conversion into someone capable of empathy. From this baggy monster emerges a satisfying portrait of one man’s contradictions.
