Mathias Enard - Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants

A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.

Christopher Beha, Harpers Magazine

The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.

Leo Robson, New Statesman

All of Enards books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. Hes the composer of a discomposing age.

Joshua Cohen, New York Times

The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isnt a small town or neighbourhood 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 rogues gallery of thieves, killers, and eccentrics. Enards prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (Zone is a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But its 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

Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure as Compass. 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

Enard has written a masterful novel that speaks to our current, confused moment in history by highlighting the manifold, vital contributions of Islamic and other Middle Eastern cultures to the European canon. More than that, it points toward, as one character puts it, a new vision that includes the other in the self.

Andrew Ervin, Washington Post

One of the finest European novels in recent memory.

Adrian Nathan West, Literary Review

Compass is a book about boundaries and non-boundaries, smudged lines between countries, languages, cultures and times. Following this multi-directional flow is a pleasure, thanks in part to prose that translated by Charlotte Mandell buoys academic detours with aphorisms and scenes plush with emotional detail. It is a book with ideas, but one that underpins its eruditeness with a sad, lovesick soul. For a novel overspilling with dead writers, Enard has created a story full of life, full of possibility for the oriental and occidental to find the self in the other.

Thomas McMullan, minor literature[s]

Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static political and cultural essay.

Steven Poole, Guardian

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

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

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

Tell them of what thou alone hast seen, then what thou hast heard, and since they be children tell them of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels, but omit not to tell them of love and suchlike.

Lifes Handicap by Rudyard Kipling