Zone
A discontinuous sentence broken up by chapters, a few of which relate a traditionally formatted story (many sentences, paragraphs, etc) the narrator reads while on the train from Milan to Rome. Not really a single sentence, as some folks say, but the formal aspects of this one only superficially interest, the way each comma-delineated phrase is like a train-track tie, which the book associates with bodies piled up on the horizontal.
Like a cut-up of an encyclopedia of the secret history of 20th century European/Mediterranean atrocities, seamlessly streaming from the consciousness of a veteran of endless armed conflict and endless psychic wars whenever at rest (if never at peace).
Namedrops and occasionally animates Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, Pound. Receives consistent nonintrustive canonical support from The Iliad. Every page lists exotic locations, not so Anglo names, wars, skirmishes, battles, conflicts, assassinations, genocides, all while alluding to classical mythology/long-lost antiquity, blending up a froth of world-weary and wartorn sophistication, like a Sebald/James Bond hybrid, like Vollmann oozing Euro essence (a mix of blood and Ouzo), like Keroauc invoking Zeus instead of Buddha, like a paramilitary Proust (oft alluded to, as well as Celine), all in all exactly like the narrator concocted by Monsieur Énard, born a few weeks before me.
As ambitious in its way as Infinite Jest and other monsters (517 pages filled with words — not much white space, no dialogue etc), yet nary a mention of advertisements — the stuff that makes people sad in the Zone (the Mediterranean region, plus Serbia/Croatia, Austria/Germany, Paris, etc) is purely gruesome historical hysteria thanks to compounding violent revenge violently avenged, on and on to the apocalypse. Yeah! Good times!
Audacity, authority, originality, heft, scope, execution, oomph, language always pushing ahead, hard to look away yet hard to read in bed, recommended for walking readers or anyone reading on the move.
Really a first-class forward-flowing associative collage of horrific histories, but never seemingly gory for the sake of gore (there’s a great amputated forearm toward the end). Sometimes it’s even tender: a heartbreaking memory of a glimpse of white panties; the ecstatic sight of a pair of siren-like dolphins.
A book everyone should probably read since it so generously suggests how much I at least don’t know, not only The Iliad but mostly everything beyond the knowledge of the occurrence of everything that’s happened over time in Germany, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria, on and on.
Not really actually recommended for most readers but, for fans of Sebald, Bolaño, Vollmann, for fans of intertexual and/or high-art international lit, this is a can’t miss atrocity exhibition.
Street of Thieves
A longer version of this is available at 3AM.
A straightforward, socio-politically aware, coming-of-age story set in 2012 (two years before publication in 2014) in Tangier, Algeciras, and Barcelona. It’s a peripheral story, backgrounded by recent headline news. For such a tight, timely novel, it must have been composed, edited, and published in French, and then translated and published in English in record time. Yet it doesn’t seem rushed. It may possibly have risked seeming dated tomorrow in exchange for timeliness today except it’s the sort of novel that endures—effortless animation of a memorable narrator (twenty-year-old Lakhdar from Tangier); precise, forward-flowing descriptions of contemporary reality; and fluent dramatization of the complexity of existence tend to age well.
Readers expecting Zone Part Deux, encountering a comparatively conventional novel, won’t be disappointed. It’s clearly the same intelligence and sensibility rendered this time in traditional sentences, paragraphs, short chapters, and sections, complete with action, conflict, rising drama, and resolution, but not in a way that feels common.
Formal conventionality makes sense considering Lakhdar’s desire for conventional European opportunity, but also considering his love of cheap thrillers. Lakhdar doesn’t mention Genet, Burroughs, Joyce, or Pound; instead he’s a fan of French thrillers he explicitly uses to escape from a succession of cages. Reading (“the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good”) brings Lakhdar respite from the truth he offers up on the first page: “we are all caged animals who live for pleasure, in obscurity.” All he wants, Lakhdar says midway through the novel, is “to be free to travel, to earn money, to walk around quietly with my girlfriend, to fuck if I want to, to pray if I want to, to sin if I want to, and to read detective novels if I feel like it without anyone finding anything to object to aside from God himself.”
God is silent for Lakhdar, however, and he equates this silence with “the absence of a master that drives dogs crazy.” The master he finds offers temporary protection but also most likely seeks to exploit him. Literature (in the form of Arabic poetry and detective novels) and languages (Arabic, French, Spanish) are his refuge, the keys to the incursions of fate that push his life (and the novel) forward. Otherwise, in the absence of a higher power, Lakhdar wants to take responsibility for himself, and he does so on the novel’s last pages when he testifies in court that he is an irreducible human being: “I am not a Moroccan, I am not a Frenchman, I’m not a Spaniard, I’m more than that . . . I am not a Muslim, I am more than that.”
Dramatizing the complexity of humanity beyond oversimplifications of race, religion, region, even a list of one’s sins, is literature’s core competency. If novels have value beyond slow, silent, textual entertainment, it’s this sort of enlightenment. A human being isn’t reducible to a type, a demographic, a number tattooed on the forearm, details about a soldier KIA long ago, or even a profile on a social media site. All Muslims aren’t alike for Christ’s sake. There’s more to the huddled masses than a dream of donning the executioner’s hood, hoping to spill bourgeois blood.
Street of Thieves is a feat of the imagination propelled by deep cultural familiarity and experience, an extraordinary animation of another person—a particular fictional human being who longs for old-fashioned liberty—superficially unlike the author but surely resembling most readers on a fundamental, intrinsic level. Reading this, I imagined the author inspired to tell the story of someone on the peripheries of the Arab Spring, not caught on camera and distributed around the world, someone longing for what’s so often taken for granted, the freedom to do what we’d like, to cross borders and walk hand in hand with a loved one, to read detective novels or even contemporary Euro Lit in translation.
Other than Ben Lerner’s 10:04, which ends with Superstorm Sandy circa Halloween 2012, I can’t think of a novel that relies so thoroughly on recent events (A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers mentions the BP spill but it’s only a line). Novels involving 9/11 took at least three or four years to come out, right? In the final third of Énard’s Street of Thieves, the 2012 demonstrations in Barcelona take center stage. Helicopters churn overhead, rubber bullets fly, protestors smash bank windows, and streets in flames are cordoned off by cops in riot gear.
There’s a mention of the Spanish king’s hunting trip to Africa, and a quick Google search reveals that it occurred in mid-April 2012. Inclusion of contemporary events, in part, makes this an urgent read. Pound’s famous dictum is “literature is news that stays news.” Énard’s use of the news as larger societal parallel of the narrator’s troubles comes off more natural than opportunistic or forced.
This sense of the story organically unfolding—despite what could have seemed like pedantic appropriation of news and narrator—owes a lot to the author’s genuine talent and skill. “You can’t teach height,” basketball commentators always say. Something similar applies to Énard’s sensibility and instincts.
Lakhadar testifies that he’s more than a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Muslim. Énard, similarly, is more than a French male writer teaching Arabic in Spain. He’s a writer whose literary identity and spirit seem unbounded. Deep knowledge of the past and presentiments of the future inform his perspectives and insights into the present. With Street of Thieves, he’s written an accessible novel of ideas and politics, propelled by longing for love and freedom. Taken together with Zone, it’s clear I’ll read everything Énard writes: his language (conveyed to us in English by Charlotte Mandell) jumps across and down the page, he doesn’t fear engaging with complicated ideas, and he manages to animate living, breathing characters who savor the complexities and ambiguities, the beauties and horrors, of life.
Compass
Finished this finally, unintentionally in the perfect way, reading from three to five in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. It’s the perfect way to finish because this is an insomniac’s diary, or more so, its conceit involves an Austrian insomniac’s cognitive perambulations in bed in Vienna as he makes his way, only ordered by the increasingly late hour, through the occidental experience of alterity (the novel’s keyword) in the orient.
It’s about the interpenetration of east and west, self in the other. Like Zone, it’s a vehicle for erudition, an assemblage of a whole lot of stuff previously unbeknownst to me. In Zone, each phrase of a discontinuous, single, 500-page sentence is like the ties along the tracks the narrator rolls over seated in a train, providing basic forward movement and structure, whereas in this one, the narrator is in bed mostly, or puttering around his apartment, as nocturnal hours pass.
In both novels, the masks the author wears (his narrators) have insider information — although he’s not a former spy as in Zone, the academic orientalist narrator of Compass feels more naturally aligned with the author who I believe at one time taught Arabic at the University of Barcelona. The narrative mask seems more transparent. At one point, research is associated with espionage and this is sort of like the secret history of the western infatuation with the east, but Énard being a great writer blurs the duality and complexifies it.
He also refers to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata solely as his 14th sonata, which I then had to look up on Spotify, which really comes in handy when reading this since you can find Mendelssohn’s Octet and choose from dozens of versions, or pieces by Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, or any other piece by western classical composers you don’t know at all or well that are discussed at one point. Someone with more time should put together a “Compass” playlist. (Oh shit! Playlist hath been put together.)
The title itself refers in part to Beethoven’s compass, which is set to point east instead of north. It’s not all about “orientalist” interests, however — there’s also a love story with another academic, Sarah, who the narrator loved and loves still, and idealizes, especially times together in Tehran and Damascus, and the love story, the history of their interactions since then, the cooling off, the letters, the time together in Vienna when Sarah only wants to visit museums related to horror, establish the novel’s spine, the trunk from which the limbs of episodes and anecdotes and the foliage of essay and ideas can grow.
Although nowhere near as conventional as Street of Thieves, the love story is satisfying enough, as is all the esoteric information and all the reference particularly to writers and artists and composers.
Ultimately, like Zone, this is a Major Reference Work, what I’ve decided to call these contemporary novels that rely so heavily on biographical reference, particularly to artists, philosophers, musicians, et al, that they’re almost something like disordered encyclopedias, like fragments from the fourteen-thousand volume compendium of all knowledge at the time that went up in flames thanks to the incursion/aggression of Westerners in China.
Loved the author’s ambition, execution, and erudition more than my reading experience: I could only read this in bits and pieces, a few pages on the subway to and from work, a few pages before sleep overwhelmed me or I decided to put it down in favor of a tight NBA playoff fourth quarter streaming to my tablet. At times I thought it could have been edited more stringently, could have been pruned throughout and lost a hundred or more pages without missing much overall, but its ranginess and excessive stream-o’-consciousness sleepless progression also seem essential to what makes it feel unique.
Definitely recommended reading for anyone willing to immerse themselves in the long history of western addiction to oriental alterity, beyond belly dancers, magic carpets, genies, all the way up to those recent black-hooded Islamic State decapitators from London. Lots of interesting opium-related stuff in here, too. And a nod to hope in the end.
All of the authors’ novels I’ve read in English have been translated by Charlotte Mandell, a tandem I count with confidence among my favorite contemporary writers thanks to this one’s addition to their achievements, all different yet united in their focus on Euro-Eastern interaction and the often but not always resultant atrocities.
Note: I’ll update this in December after I read Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, to be published by New Directions in late November 2018.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).