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A review by jpegben
Zone by Mathias Énard
4.75
…ogres want everything, take everything, eat everything, power, money, weapons, and females, in that order, and these stories of monsters reminded me of my own ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench all their thirst for mythic humanity, violence and desire, these stories were the delights of the man in the street, the children, the meek, happy to see the powerful get humiliated in turn in front of someone more powerful, lose their honor their wives as the poor had lost their houses their children or their legs in a bombardment, which after all seemed less serious than dishonor and humiliation, the defeat of the powerful is tremendous, beautiful and loud, a hero always makes noise when he collapses, a hundred kilos of muscle strike the ground in one huge dull thud, the public is on its feet to see Hector tied to the chariot, see his head wobble and his blood spurt, the ogre conquered by an even bigger ogre…
Reading Zone is like being strapped to a ballistic missile. The book is a single propulsive sentence which hurtles through space and time, through a world inhabited by monsters and haunted by ghosts. Enard has created something which is churning, monstrous, and unremittingly brilliant. Sections of this book are horrific others are hilarious and others still are crushingly sad. When thinking of adjectives to describe this novel a few come to mind: bruising, breathless, benumbing. At times, it seems to teeter on the edge of insanity, staring into a maelstrom of violence, hatred, and willful self-delusion.
Francis Mirkovic is a remarkable if horrific literary creation. He's a murderer, a war criminal, an erudite yet obsessed amateur historian, a spy from a family of Ustashi operatives on one side and French resistance fighters on the other. What is so remarkable about Francis as a character is that, in spite of the capacity for barbarous violence which lurks within, he is at times deeply sympathetic, extremely self-aware and highly perceptive to the absurdity of the hatred and violence in which he is immersed. Miserable and exhausted, he feels trapped in a cage of madness as he methodically details, through his own experiences and the history of the zone (the great region on and around the Mediterranean) how the desire for vengeance poisons the hearts of ordinary men and turns them into killers. The intent to commit unspeakable deeds and heinous crimes does not emerge from the abyss fully-formed, but simmers in history's cauldron until it reaches a boiling point:
fates driven by hatred and war, it’s hard to understand hatred when you haven’t experienced it or when you’ve forgotten the burning violence the rage that lifts your arm against an enemy his wife his child wanting revenge wanting pain for them make them suffer too, destroy their houses disinter their dead with mortar shells plant our semen in their females and our bayonets in their eyes shower them with insults and kicks because I myself had cried when I saw the solitary body of a beheaded kid clutching a toy in a ditch, a grandmother disemboweled with a crucifix, a comrade tortured enucleated grilled in gas like a shriveled-up grasshopper, his eyesockets empty and white, almost gleaming in the carbonized mass of the corpse, images that still today set my heart beating faster, make my fists clench, ten years late
Sections of this book are absolutely riveting, particularly the book within a book about the Palestinian fighters in Beirut, the sections which muse on Francis' own experiences on the front in Croatia and Bosnia, his nocturnal adventures in Venice and Trieste, and the encyclopaedic digressions about the region's great butchers and madmen. What Enard seems obsessed by is the cyclicality of violence and history, of how the narratives of the zone seem to repeat again and again, how destiny becomes a cudgel which beats individuals into meek submission. The prose is first rate and so quotable, but one short excerpt really stood out to me which illustrates this point:
we’re all attached to each other by indissoluble ties of heroic blood, by the intrigues of our jealous gods
Of course, Francis conceives of himself as a sort of modern-day Achilles and the book is a postmodern Odyssey of sorts. But it seems to me that there is a very deliberate attempt on the part of Enard to shatter any illusions of heroism and it may be an Odyssey in form but not effect. It is, in fact, the biographies and writings of other writers and artists that obsess Francis which truly form the shape of this book. The cynicism, opportunistic antisemitism, and sheer literary brilliance of Louis-Ferdinand Celine; the smouldering anger, drunkenness, and apocalyptic prose of Malcolm Lowry; the seething fascist hatred and poetic brilliance of Ezra Pound; the simpering collaboration and wry observations of Curzio Malaparte; the decadence of William Burroughs; the elitism of James Joyce; and, of course, the inescapable contributions of the greatest of them all, Cervantes, himself an active participant in the violent machinations of the zone. Is Francis an agglomeration of these men, of their worst excesses, just another flawed man charged with chronicling the graves and the bones and the ashes and diamonds? I suppose Enard is obsessed by shadow lives and shadow histories, by the forgotten corners and the fading echoes which are as true, as resonant, and perhaps even more so than conventional histories and narratives.
Credit to Charlotte Mandell for her translation of this. It was spellbinding to read and translating prose like that is a formidable accomplishment. I'll definitely revisit this in the future because it's so rich and there's so much texture.