A short life of the author
Mathias Énard (b. 1972) was born on 11 January 1972 in Niort, France. He studied Arabic and Persian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. He lived in Barcelona, Beirut, and Damascus. He is a professor of Arabic at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Life and Career
Zone (2008) — a 500-page novel written as a single sentence, narrated by a French intelligence agent on a train from Milan to Rome carrying a briefcase of documents about Mediterranean wars — was his most formally ambitious work.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (2010) — a novella about Michelangelo’s imagined journey to Constantinople in 1506 to design a bridge for the Sultan — was a fable about the encounter between civilisations.
Compass (Boussole, 2015) — in which Franz Ritter, a Viennese musicologist, lies awake through a single night, thinking about his unrequited love for a French Orientalist and about the deep, centuries-long exchange between Western and Eastern music, literature, and scholarship — won the Prix Goncourt. It is a novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann, structured as a night-long meditation.
Key Works
- Compass (2015)
- Zone (2008)
- Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (2010)
Collecting Énard
French editions (Actes Sud) are the true firsts. English translations (Fitzcarraldo Editions, New Directions) bring $10–$25.