Mathias Enard

Uncomfortable truths

It is difficult to think of any anglophone novelist alive whose range or skill or depth could rival that of Frenchman Mathias Enard (born 1972), each of whose books takes us on a deep imaginative, sharp intellectual journey. Hoorah for Fitzcarraldo Editions which have so far produced six splendid translations of his fiction. Most London publishers at the moment are philistines, who know little about the literature outside the English-speaking worlds, and who (usually vainly) are pursuing the elusive best-seller rather than trying to publish the best books being written. And as Fitzcarraldo demonstrates, we are living in an age where very MUCH good stuff is being produced, most of it outside the narrow comfort-zone of London agents and publishers who are shockingly ignorant.

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COMPASS, the first Enard I read, is the world seen through a love-lorn, sleepless musicologist in Vienna, pursuing not only a musical journey but a profound engagement with the culture of old Persia, Morocco and other elements in the Islamic world. THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVE-DIGGERS’ GUILD , by turns hilarious and disgusting, is about a young anthropologist observing the life of a pretty primitive bit of provincial France. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS AND ELEPHANTS imagines Michelangelo being commissioned to build a bridge across the Golden Horn.

The books make a huge demand, intellectually, on the reader, since they assume - even if we do not have the author’s expertise in music, mathematics, Farsi poetry etc we will see the point of intellectual passion, of academic interest taking over a human life. They are philosophical novels in the fullest sense of the word.

I’ve just read a 2023 novel , translated in 2025 as THE DESERTERS by Charlotte Mandell. (French title DESERTER). Of all his wonderful books, this is, for me, so far the most impressive. It is very concise (unlike some of his) and it would not be exaggerating, to say that in this taut double-fable, Enard has told the political history of the last half century. He has skewered what we have all been up to, in the Cold War, the strife between the West and Islamists, in the terrifying drift from The End of History to the re-eruption of war as a way of making our world problems even worse. What we have been up to, and what we have NOT been up to - it is in part about burying our heads in the sand, pretending that the nightmare is not happening, even as the news, every night, tells us of the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the ideological divisions between “Liberalism” and religion, between the parts of “our” past which we want to bury and the parts which we have conveniently edited.

As often in an Enard story, it is seen through the prism of a figure whom many would think an unlikely central intelligence for an accessible modern fiction - namely an abstruse East German mathematician who remains loyal to his communist ideas and ideals until his death (suicide) by drowning in the late 1970s.

This novel is about a very basic subject: the