Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt
As night falls over Vienna,Franz Ritter,an insomniac musicologist,takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories.
There he lies,revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul,Aleppo,Damascus,and Tehran,as well as the various writers,artists,musicians,academics,Orientalists,and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive,unrequited love,Sarah,a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.
An immersive,nocturnal,musical novel,full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour,Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration,a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out - like a bridge between West and East,yesterday and tomorrow. Described by his publishers as a "poetic eulogy to the long history of cultural exchanges between east and west",this is Mathias Enard's most ambitious novel since Zone.
'There are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.'- The FT
The Man Booker International judges comment:'A restless but hypnotic novel written with remarkable erudition and sensitivity. Enard explores relationships between Europe and the Middle East and relationships between people with an equally fierce intelligence. The musicality and musicology in the book are reflected in the lyricism of Charlotte Mandell's translation.'
Mathias énard was born in 1972 in Niort,France,studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East travelling before settling in Barcelona where he composed his first novel,La Perfection du Tir. He is best known for his 2008 novel,Zone. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Compass.
Charlotte Mandellhas translated ction,poetry,and philosophy from French,including works by Proust,Flaubert,Genet,Maupassant,Blanchot,and many other distinguished authors. She received a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Zone.
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo EditionsISBN: 9781910695234Dimensions: 195 x 127 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'One of the finest European novels in recent memory.'- Adrian Nathan West,Literary Review
'Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure asCompass. Reading it amounts to wandering into a library arranged in the form of an exotic sweet shop,full of tempting fragments of stories guaranteed leaving you wanting more.'-Eileen Battersby,Irish Times
'Compassis a challenging,brilliant,and - God help me - important a novel as is likely to be published this year.'-Justin Taylor,Los Angeles Times
'Crisply translated by Charlotte Mandell (as wasZone),Compassis Proustian in its set-up. Thereare passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.'- Tobias Grey,Financial Times
'The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn't a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin,and practically everyone within it. Enard speaks Persian and Arabic,and he has taught at universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region,a "zone,"as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine books,three of which have been translated into English,he has charted a course through this zone,writing about sectarian violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism,tradition,and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue's gallery of thieves,killers,and eccentrics. Enard's prose,which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (Zoneis a single,five-hundred-page sentence),can be mesmerizing. But it's the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction,Enard is constructing an intricate,history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.'-Jacob Silverman,New Yorker
'Enard is like the anti-Houellebecq,and he deserves far more attention.'- Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal
'The beauty ofCompassis the sheer breadth and density of its vision,calling forth a multitude of different worlds,bound only by the capacious mind of its narrator,an aging Austrian musicologist named Franz Ritter.'-Jeffrey Zuckerman,New Republic
'A love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East...(a) strangely powerful work.'-Steven Poole,Guardian
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