BOOK OF THE WEEK: MATHIAS ENARD STREET OF THIEVES

This week's Book of the Week is Mathias Enard's Street of Thieves, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. The book was originally published in French as Rue des voleurs by Actes Sud. Here, the publisher Jacques Testard gives us an insight into Enard's newest book:

Violent conflict; the weight of history, geography and memory on the present; the permeability of frontiers and cultures – these are some of the themes that run through Mathias Enard’s books, from his début La perfection du tir, obliquely about the Lebanese Civil War, through to Boussole, his latest novel, just published in France, which takes orientalism, or the relationship between east and west in recent and not so recent history, as its subject.

When I was looking for a novel to launch Fitzcarraldo Editions with eighteen months ago, I was amazed to find out that Zone by Mathias Enard, which I’d read in French when Actes Sud published it in 2008, had never appeared in Britain, and that Enard did not have a British publisher, for any of his books. Zone tells the story of a French secret agent, Francis Servain Mirkovic, travelling on a train from Milan to Rome with a briefcase full of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean – that he plans to sell to the Vatican. On this train journey, he recounts the violent history of the Zone in the twentieth century, starting with the Balkans War, in which he fought for a far-right Croatian militia. It’s an ambitious book in terms of subject matter, but it takes form very seriously too: it’s a 528-page stream of consciousness novel written as one long sentence (but broken up into twenty-four chapters). It sounds hard to read, but isn’t – the rhythm of the language, and the intensity of the episodes and anecdotes it recounts propel the reader along. It’s also a politically-engaged book that poses many questions about the violent foundations of the Europe we live in today, and many other things besides, but it was also the ideal book to launch a publishing house that wants to publish the best, most ambitious contemporary literature, both in English and in translation.

Street of Thieves, the second Enard novel published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and the author’s last but one to appear in French, is very much in the same vein, though more contemporary in its scope and concerns. It follows the trials and tribulations of a young Tangerois called Lakhdar, who finds himself on the path to emigration to Spain after being caught in flagrante with his cousin Meryem. It is part road movie, part bildungsroman, and the narrative arc enables Enard to deal with the tremors of the Arab spring, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean – reading Street of Thieves will remind you that, though the scale of the issue is bigger, the plight of migrants crossing the sea is nothing new – and the indignados movement in Spain. It’s a novel about the world we live in today, written, unusually from the perspective of the other (and Enard is qualified to write from this perspective, having lived in the Middle East for years, and subsequently teaching Arabic at the university of Barcelona). There is also another dimension to Street of Thieves: it’s an homage to noir literature, and as such Street of Thieves has the narrative pace and darkness one encounters in the works of Izzo and Manchette, two authors the narrator Lakhdar becomes obsessed with as he plots an escape from Tangier to Barcelona amidst the political turmoil.

Fernand Braudel is very much the historian of the Mediterranean, and it may be that Mathias Enard is becoming its novelist. In any case, I’m not alone in thinking that he is one of the very best contemporary French writers: he might well win the Goncourt prize this year. Commercial considerations aside (in case you hadn’t realised, I am his publisher), he deserves a wider audience in English, and Street of Thieves is an ideal introduction to Enard’s work. In the words of Leo Robson, it "confirms Enard as the most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq".

For more information about the book, please visit the publisher's website here.