From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, a comic novel set in the French countryside. To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language.
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.
