Mathias Énard - Compass

Intelligent writers are fairly common. Erudite ones, somewhat less. There arent many ambitious writers, either. Im not talking about the writers who seek fame they are legion but about those who believe like Calvino that Literature can survive only by pursuing outsized goals, even those beyond all hope of achievement. Mathias Enard is all of the above.
Olivier Rolin, author of The Meteorologist

The new Balzac.
Grgoire Lemnager, LObs

One of the most interesting novelists of his generation
Raphalle Leyris, Le Monde

A text in perpetual motion, with long and beautiful spiralling sentences like the whirls of smoke from an opium pipe, Compass is a novel of escape, oscillating constantly between East and West, between Nervalian melancholy and slightly lighter tones.
Elisabeth Philippe, Les Inrockuptibles

Praise for Street of Thieves

Street of Thieves confirms Enard as the most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.
Leo Robson, New Statesman

This is what the great contemporary French novel should be. Enard looks at the world as it is: poisoned by religion, poisoned by politics, choking on materialism and dying of globalization. His prose bites, and his characters retain our sympathy however extreme their actions. Enard fuses the traditions of Cline and Camus, but he is his own man.
Patrick McGuinness, author of The Last Hundred Days

A remarkable and important novel. I cant think of any better contemporary writers than Enard.
Thom Cuell, Bookmunch

Street of Thieves is a feat of the imagination propelled by deep cultural familiarity and experience, an extraordinary animation of another person Ill read everything Enard writes from now on.
Lee Klein, 3:AM Magazine

Street of Thieves represents the kind of fiction one hopes will emerge, from Enard or others, after the tumult once known as the Arab Spring has receded a little further into the past.
Robert F. Worth, New York Times

Set against a backdrop of rising Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, Enards latest novel is a howling elegy for thwarted youth.
Publishers Weekly

Praise for Zone

Mathias nard has found a way to restore death to life and life to death, and so joins the first rank of novelists, the bringers of fire, who even as they cant go on, do.
Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions

Enards novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing The result is a modern masterpiece.
David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

The brilliance of Zone lies in its brutal refusal to stop. Again and again, Mathias Enards white-knuckle narrative plunges us back into the battle-scarred past, forcing us to confront its horrors a relentlessly inventive novel.
David Winters, Literary Review

[T]he material of a conventional thriller has been sublimated into an atmosphere of violence, power and cruelty; humanity here is little more than a vector through which various kinds of insanity flow.
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

The novel of the decade, if not of the century.
Christophe Claro, translator of Thomas Pynchon

Zone is a major and compelling work, a work that will keep you in its grip from its first utterance to its last.
Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

Like Flaubert and James Joyce, Enard seems to have found a model for his omnivorous novel in the Homeric epic, while Ezra Pounds ghost also haunts Zone. Enards erudite and ambitious novel is a Flaubertian encyclopaedia of our times at the end of a violent century.
Stephen Burn, New York Times

I havent read anything this worthy of publication in years, nor this stylistically and thematically interesting, this politically and literarily engaged, this exciting and gripping, this moving and heart-breaking and this the real kicker given that Zone is a 521 page stream of consciousness readable. Zone is as close to a flawless novel as I have encountered in a very, very, long time.
Scott Manley Hadley, The Triumph of the Now

Die Augen schlie ich wieder,

Noch schlgt das Herz so warm.

Wann grnt ihr Bltter am Fenster?

Wann halt ich mein Liebchen im Arm?

Once more I try to close my eyes

yet my heart beats strong and warm

when will the leaves at my window turn green,

when will I hold my darling in my arms?

Wilhelm Mller & Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise