Compass
July 6, 2017 - Comment
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world
On the shortlist for the 2017 International Man Booker 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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Masterpiece A counterpoint to Houellebecq, to learn about how Western culture was influenced by the Middle East, in a dreamy Proust-like prose.
Stunning novel by a true Master of Fiction A most beautiful, intelligent, enlightening, oddly romantic novel. Absolutely fabulous, breathtaking – tearful at times. I’m awed. For those who write and attempt to write about ideas and about history and mysticism, art and music, on the subject of religion new and old, East & West, and about magic and, above all, love – you’d hope to write this book.
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…