Compass - Softcover

Énard, Mathias; Mandell, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811227472 ISBN 13: 9780811227476

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

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.

About this title

Review:

In this magisterial, exquisitely erudite novel, the insomniac meditations of the bedridden and lovelorn musicologist Franz Ritter take the reader on a vast, crisscrossing perambulation through the rich history of the commingling of Orient and Occident in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[H]is most far-reaching and accomplished book and one of the finest European novels in recent memory.--Adrian Nathan West"Compass" (03/28/2017)

Mr. Énard fuses recollection and scholarly digression into a swirling, hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration. [...] So this sad yet invigorating novel is both a love letter to a vanishing discipline and an elegy. Franz's mental circumnavigations constitute a celebration of the civilizing power of knowledge and 'the beauty of sharing and diversity.'--Sam Sacks (03/10/2017)

[A] brilliant, elusive, outré love letter to Middle Eastern art and culture.--Dustin Illingworth""With Suffering and Love, At Daybreak" On Mathias Énard's "Compass"" (06/27/2017)

A novelist like Énard 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 (03/10/2017)

Mathias Énard 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 can't go on, do.--Garth Risk Hallberg (03/10/2017)

Énard's prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another... can be mesmerizing. But it's the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Énard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.-- (03/10/2017)

Énard has written a masterful novel...-- (03/10/2017)

In a time of fear and loathing, Énard's magnum opus points us toward the reality behind so many myths of the Orient.-- (03/10/2017)

This astonishing, encyclopedic, and otherwise outré meditation by Énard on the cultural intersection of East and West takes the form of an insomniac's obsessive imaginings--dreams, memories, and desires--which come to embody the content of a life, or perhaps several.... [An] opium addict's dream of a novel.-- (03/10/2017)

About the Author:

Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Zone, and Street of Thieves.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0811227472
• ISBN 13: 9780811227476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448