Compass, by Mathias Enard
Vienna. Nightfall. Franz Ritter, a musicologist - of whom the reader is quickly told that he suffers from an incurable and voluntarily nameless disease - goes to bed, but he cannot find sleep. His mind is full of thoughts, triggered by an intriguing scientific article he received from the Sarawak Province earlier that day, and written by his long-time friend and unconfessed sweetheart, Sarah.
Sarawak. Sarah. Franz Ritter's expert musical knowledge cannot, of course, ignore the identical sonorities of the two names. The word fate starts ringing in the reader's mind, as he embarks on a journey into Franz Ritter's memories of his years as a scholar in the Middle East.
To say that a novel enables the reader to travel is a literary commonplace. When it comes to Compass, anyway, the verb cannot even cover the reality of the reading experience. The descriptions of Aleppo, Damascus, Tehran, Vienna and many other cities are so minutely detailed, the synesthesia so complete, and the memories so vivid that the readers find themselves immersed in a world that is most probably completely unknown to them.
Mathias Enard also provides the reader, in Compass, with an extensive and absolutely fascinating amount of research in the field of the so-called oriental music. What is particularly interesting is that at no point are the East and the West severed from one another: through Franz Ritter's own centre of interests in music, we are shown how intricately linked the cultures are, and how they influence one another. It should also be underlined that Franz Ritter is extremely lucid about his own position as a white European scholar and the difficulties linked to the exploration and study of other cultures without falling into the trap of a neo-colonial, condescending tone. Compass, in the end, the humble narrative of the memories of a very curious and very erudite man, with a profound interest in other human beings and other cultures.
Compass was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2015 and is shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize! The novel will also be featured in the French Institute's new festival of French live literature, Beyond Words, in May 2017. Find out more on the festival's website!
If you are still skeptical about Compass and are in need of a second opinion, here are a few reviews, as well as the Financial Times' and the Guardian's articles on Mathias Enard's novel:
‘Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure as Compass. 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 ‘[T]he beauty of Compass is 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 ‘Compass is 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 was Zone), Compass is Proustian in its set-up. ... [T]here are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.’ — Tobias Grey, Financial Times ‘Enard has written a masterful novel that speaks to our current, confused moment in history by highlighting the manifold, vital contributions of Islamic and other Middle Eastern cultures to the European canon. More than that, it points toward, as one character puts it, “a new vision that includes the other in the self.”’ — Andrew Ervin, Washington Post ‘In a world that has become afraid of intelligence, Compass – slowly, I imagine, and carefully translated by Charlotte Mandell – is a deeply intelligent novel, a book that I could vanish into forever.’ — Anthony Brown, Time’s Flow Stemmed ‘[A] love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East ... [a] strangely powerful work.’ — Steven Poole, Guardian ‘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 Magazine ‘Lyrical and intellectually rich without ever being ponderous, reminiscent at turns of Mann’s Death in Venice and Bowles’ Sheltering Sky.’ — Kirkus (starred review)
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