Compass

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 centre 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.

An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out - like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow.

Reviews

One of the finest European novels in recent memory.
Adrian Nathan West, Literary Review

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

Compassis a challenging, brilliant, and God help me important a novel as is likely to be published this year.
Justin Taylor,Los Angeles Times

Crisply translated by Charlotte Mandell (as wasZone),Compassis Proustian in its set-up. Thereare passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.
Tobias Grey,Financial Times

The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isnt a small town or neighborhood 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 (Zoneis 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

Enard is like the anti-Houellebecq, and he deserves far more attention.
Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal

The beauty ofCompassis the sheer breadth and density of its vision, calling forth a multitude of different worlds, bound only by the capacious mind of its narrator, an aging Austrian musicologist named Franz Ritter.
Jeffrey Zuckerman,New Republic

A love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East ... [a] strangely powerful work.
Steven Poole,Guardian

Author Bio

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix litteraire de la Porte Doree, and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Compass.

Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant and Blanchot.