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), Tell Them
of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, Zone, and Street of Thieves.
A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, Mandell has translated works by a
number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert,
Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.
"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."
*The New York Times*
"A fever-dream meditation on East and West and a lost love that
binds the two worlds... Lyrical and intellectually rich without
ever being ponderous, reminiscent at turns of Mann's Death in
Venice and Bowles' Sheltering Sky."
*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)*
"Compass is as challenging, brilliant, and—God help me—important a
novel as is likely to be published this year."
*Justin Taylor - The Los Angeles Times*
"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."
*The New Yorker*
"Énard has written a masterful novel..."
*The Washington Post*
"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 - The Wall Street Journal*
"Compass is poetic, ironic, irresistible."
*Jane Ciabattari - BBC*
"For all its sandstorm of scholarship, translated with tireless
eloquence by Charlotte Mandell, Compass aches with that simple
yearning. 'Only love' of a person or a culture, thinks Franz under
the stars of Syria, 'opens us up to the other.'"
*The Economist*
"[H]is most far-reaching and accomplished book and one of the
finest European novels in recent memory."
*Adrian Nathan West - Literary Review*
"[A] brilliant, elusive, outré love letter to Middle Eastern
art and culture."
*Dustin Illingworth - Los Angeles Review of Books*
"Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies
an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static
political and cultural essay."
*The Guardian*
"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 - Harper's Magazine*
"In a time of fear and loathing, Énard’s magnum opus points us
toward the reality behind so many myths of the Orient."
*New Republic*
"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."
*Publishers Weekly*
"[A] masterly new novel that attempts to redeem the specter of the
Orient..."
*Library Journal*
"Mathias Énard is the most brazen French writer since
Houellebecq."
*New Statesman*
"Compass is a novel about many things. At its surface it is about
the pull of unmet dreams and ambitions. The falsities of love. But
at the crux of this examination of a human life is the fabric of
cultures intersecting—and in the truth that the pathos of grief
exempts no one."
*Yasmin Roshanian - EuropeNow*
"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 - The Millions*
"It’s with no small amount of urgency that Mathias
Énard’s Compass, an engrossing meditation on the cultural and
historical tension between Europe and the Islamic world, arrives
from New Directions in a gorgeous translation by Charlotte
Mandell."
*Hal Hlavinka - Quarterly Conversation*
"Comparisons of Compass with The Thousand and One Nights and with
Proust (and Ritter thinks about both) are not only inevitable, but
necessary."
*Frank Richardson - Numero Cinq*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |