The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild

(Paperback)

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To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around restlessly on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language, presided over by the village mayor. Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess - and a paradoxically macabre paean to life's inexhaustible richness.

Reviews

''Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works - ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional - are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfectbalance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.' - Javier Cercas, author ofThe Impostor

'Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful stylist to boot. He is one of the great novelists of our time.' - Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author ofThe Shape of the Ruins

'Mathias Enard is an immensely ambitious writer.... Fortunately, his ambition is matched by an equally extraordinary talent. His elegant prose ... is admirably precise and intellectually limpid - he makes no concessions.' -Alberto Manguel, El Pais

'All of Enard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age.' -Joshua Cohen, New York Times


'A novelist like Enard 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

Author Bio

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. 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, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is his fifth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.