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. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald. The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the takes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.
Utterly distinct in form and tone, these braided stories demand a certain vigilance from the reader, an alertness to echo and intuition ... If the Heudeber chapters are more formally direct and immediate, the deserter sections 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.
Rich, unsettling ... Maja, too, is a compelling character ... This is a moving, elegant and frequently uncomfortable novel about the emotional stakes of difficult choices made amid the most unbearable situations.
The chapters about the deserter are visceral, full of sensory detail. Refreshingly, the story considers the treatment of women in war. The prose is deconstructed, with poetic line breaks and intermittent capitalisation and punctuation, as if war decomposes language itself. Unlike Énard’s usual first-person, however, it’s told mostly in a close-third, with sometimes shifting points of view. Its parabalistic quality, intended perhaps to make us consider all wars, somewhat mitigates the reader’s emotional engagement ... The bulk of clunkiness— mid-sentence tense changes, for example—accurately reflects Énard’s choices, equally awkward in French, rather than Mandell’s translation ... Irina’s first-person account, intermingled with letters, would seem to be more personal, but here too we are kept at arm’s length by her academic tone and reference to her parents by their first names ... While containing thematic echoes, the two strands of the book run in parallel without ever intersecting. Although not in itself a problem—we don’t need things to be tied neatly in a bow—their stylistic differences break the narrative flow ... With his consistent representation of war in his fiction, Énard reminds us to shed our rose-tinted glasses.
