Compass
March 22, 2018 - Comment
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world
On the shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize
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, 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 center 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.
With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources―nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie―and binds them together in a most magical way.
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Brilliant Not an easy read, but if you are interested in music, travel, and the Orient/Occident conflict, then this book is for you . Wide ranging and yet intimate, it obvious why “Compass” is so prized in France. So sit back, play those Orient inspired symphonies and enjoy a trip to a new found yet ancient land.
Sleepless protagonist puts reader to sleep. It seems to go on interminably. As a music historian, I found the musical material interesting but the stream of consciousness (insomnia?) is exhausting to read. I DIDN’T SUFFER INSOMNIA READING IT.
A masterwork This is not a conventional novel and some reader might miss the âactionâ. A sleepless and fevery night presents the narrator, a musicologist in Vienna (âthe gate to the Orientâ) specialized in Oriental music, with memories and visions of his life and profession. He takes us on a long journey full of recent anecdotes of stays in Istanbul, Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra (before the civil war), Teheran (before, during, and after the so-called Islamic Revolution) and other places, with details on…