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    Zone
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    Zone
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    Zone
    Ebook501 pages8 hours

    Zone

    By Mathias Enard

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Francis Mirkovi?, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard’s Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFitzcarraldo Editions
    Release dateAug 20, 2014
    ISBN9780992974725
    Unavailable
    Zone
    Author

    Mathias Enard

    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 Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée 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.

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    Reviews for Zone

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      .............I enjoy a challenging read now and again and Zone certainly lives up to that - it is basically a one-night train trip where the narrator ruminates over his 40 years of terror, torture and treachery in the lands bordering the Mediterranean which have been the source of endless conflict in effect since the beginning of civilization, a meditation by a person who doesn't seem to have ever tried to change the course of history in any kind of positive manner until now, rather "going with the flow" even when that meant maiming and killing innocent victims in the "fog of war" and excuse the run-on sentence that I have written because Zone is essentially that - one sentence (with three short breaks) that meander and bend across 500 pages but seriously if you want to have a unique reading experience and have the patience and enjoy learning more than usual about 20th century European, North African and Middle Eastern atrocities, give Zone a try.....................
    • 5/5
      One last suitcase and I’ll join Sashka with the transparent gaze . . . no more lists no more torturers’ victims investigations . . . I’m changing my life

      Such recalls Umberto Eco's definition of a polymath, one that is interested in everything and nothing else. Enard's gripping novel punches this reader with the weight of nearly all recorded (recoded) history in its wake.
    • 5/5
      Exhausting and beautiful.
      Reviews of this book often mention the fact that is is written in a single sentence- though with chapter breaks and quoted portions from another fictional novel. Rather than being gimmicky or tedious, Énard's approach actually casts a hypnotic rhythm over the reader. It results in a surprisingly readable and exceptionally sensitive novel. Probably the finest display of the stream-of-consciousness technique I have encountered.
      The exhausting aspect of Zone is also that which I feel makes it an important work. The character endlessly turns his attention to his own violent past and to a long recounting of various (mostly) 20th century wars, atrocities, and bleak moments in recent human history. The scars his own experiences have left on him are readily apparent- and by proxy the injuries done to those communities and individuals affected by the violent moments he recounts. Books like these are rarely easy to read, but remain vital and necessary.
    • 2/5
      The reviews, pre-publication reviews, and endorsements of this novel all focus on the notion that it is a single long sentence. (For example Patrick Reardon in the Chicago Tribune, December 9, 2008, which is included in the publisher's press pack.)But this book is not one sentence, for at least four reasons. Two of them are listed in an excellent short survey of long sentences by Tim Park (New York Times, December 24, 2010, in the Book Review, p. 27):1. The sentence is "compromised" by 23 chapter breaks2. Three of the chapters are excerpts from an imaginary book that the narrator in "Zone" is reading, and those three chapters are full of periods. But there are two stronger reasons why "Zone" isn't a sentence:3. Énard sometimes gives up commas, so that the prose becomes agrammatical. It's not a sentence if it is a string of sentence fragments.4. Énard mixes tenses, doesn't observe parallel constructions, doesn't avoid run-on phrases, and doesn't make any attempt to structure his book according to subject, verb, and object: in other words, he only takes intermittent notice of the convention called the sentence.But it's hard to see how any of this matters. By concentrating on the supposed single sentence, the publicity engine that has driven readers to this book misses other more important points. First is the literary genealogy of the long sentence. It's a typically modernist strategy, most famously used by Joyce, Faulkner, and Beckett, intended to represent an experience labeled the stream of consciousness. Why, then, should readers in 2011 be interested in the continuation of this particular device? Wouldn't it at least be interesting to ask why Énard feels that early twentieth-century experiments fit his theme of twenty-first century politics?Then there's the problem of the disconnect between the political and historical themes of the novel and its anti-grammatical construction. In the New New York Times review ("River of Consciousness," January 9, 2011), Stephen Burn says that "the lack of formal boundaries permits an openness that counters the protagonist's obsession with the other boundaries men make and fight over," but that implies that all the "boundaries" the narrator recounts -- and the book is made of hundreds of such stories, from ancient Greek mythology to the wars in Iraq -- are equally well balanced by the tumbling endless prose. Is each act of warfare equally well answered by the missing periods that express it? Is each missing period a small indictment of the boundaries people construct? There's a mismatch between the specificity of the historical material and the sameness of the lack of punctuation. Then there's the carelessness of writing without periods and other punctuation. It's easy to write a version of the prose Énard writes here. It's much easier, in many ways, than constructing long sentences: I would trade this entire 500-page book for the sharpness of a couple of William Gass's fabulous sentences in "On Being Blue."There is also a disconnect between the prose and the consciousness it is meant to represent. In Beckett's prose, or in Molly Bloom's monologue, there is a reason for the tumbling endless narration. Here, in Burns's words, Énard "leaves the reader floating free in the liquid" of the narrator's mind: but why is the narrator equally angry, equally disoriented, equally atemporal, in respect to each individual moment in history? Even though Énard admires Joyce, Pound, Butor, and others, his mixture of allusions has more to do with Sebald: but in Sebald, different places and stories have differing weight, and require differing degrees of patience and coherence. Énard also admires the Pound of the Cantos, but those are deliberately fragmentary -- another high modernist trope -- while here, everything is melted as if it were the same.And does it bear saying that the writing, and the allusions, are ponderous, portentous, and humorless? The weight of history has the same leaden quality here that it does in George Steiner. I wonder if what caught the press's attention wasn't the very superficial combination of a gimmick (a long sentence), a leaden world-historical seriousness, and the commonplace rehearsal of Mediterranean political guilt and honor. I notice several of the endorsements are from French television and journalism.In brief: the book is full of stories, and some of the stories are full of passion, but letting your sentences slump is not a radical strategy: it's a way of not working hard to make language fit its subject.