Compass (Prix Goncourt Winner)

by Mathias Énard, Charlotte Mandell (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.

With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227476
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	395,873
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, Zone, and Street of Thieves.

A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, Mandell has translated works by a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.

Editorial Reviews

"Compass is a novel about many things. At its surface it is about the pull of unmet dreams and ambitions. The falsities of love. But at the crux of this examination of a human life is the fabric of cultures intersecting—and in the truth that the pathos of grief exempts no one."

EuropeNow - Yasmin Roshanian

"Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static political and cultural essay."

The Guardian

"Mathias Énard is the most brazen French writer since Houellebecq."

New Statesman

"Compass is as challenging, brilliant, and—God help me—important a novel as is likely to be published this year."

The Los Angeles Times

"Mr. Énard fuses recollection and scholarly digression into a swirling, hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration. [...] So this sad yet invigorating novel is both a love letter to a vanishing discipline and an elegy. Franz’s mental circumnavigations constitute a celebration of the civilizing power of knowledge and 'the beauty of sharing and diversity.'"

The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"[A] brilliant, elusive, outré love letter to Middle Eastern art and culture."

“With Suffering and Love, At Daybreak”: On Mathias Énard’s “Compass” - Los Angeles Re - Dustin Illingworth

"For all its sandstorm of scholarship, translated with tireless eloquence by Charlotte Mandell, Compass aches with that simple yearning. 'Only love' of a person or a culture, thinks Franz under the stars of Syria, 'opens us up to the other.'"

The Economist

"Compass is poetic, ironic, irresistible."

BBC - Jane Ciabattari

"[H]is most far-reaching and accomplished book and one of the finest European novels in recent memory."

Compass - Literary Review - Adrian Nathan West

"Énard’s prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another... can be mesmerizing. But it’s the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Énard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world."

The New Yorker

"Comparisons of Compass with The Thousand and One Nights and with Proust (and Ritter thinks about both) are not only inevitable, but necessary."

Numero Cinq - Frank Richardson

"In a time of fear and loathing, Énard’s magnum opus points us toward the reality behind so many myths of the Orient."

New Republic

"It’s with no small amount of urgency that Mathias Énard’s Compass, an engrossing meditation on the cultural and historical tension between Europe and the Islamic world, arrives from New Directions in a gorgeous translation by Charlotte Mandell."

Compass by Mathias Énard - Quarterly Conversation - Hal Hlavinka

"Mathias Énard has found a way to restore death to life and life to death, and so joins the first rank of novelists, the bringers of fire, who even as they can’t go on, do."

The Millions - Garth Risk Hallberg

"In this magisterial, exquisitely erudite novel, the insomniac meditations of the bedridden and lovelorn musicologist Franz Ritter take the reader on a vast, crisscrossing perambulation through the rich history of the commingling of Orient and Occident in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

The New York Times

"Énard has written a masterful novel..."

The Washington Post

"A novelist like Énard 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."

Harper's Magazine - Christopher Beha

"Compass is as challenging, brilliant, and—God help me—important a novel as is likely to be published this year."

The Los Angeles Times - Justin Taylor

…[a] masterly new novel…All of [Énard's] books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings, but can merely indicate the energies underlying an attempt at stabilizing meanings, and the bitterness that ensues when those attempts inevitably fail (even in Charlotte Mandell's resoundingly successful translation). Ritter's record of this pursuit is the record of his pursuit of love—but of a distant love, a doomed love—a love that won't be returned; not by Sarah, not by the "foreign" cultures he dwells among, and, most grievously, not by music itself. He becomes the bard of a world growing smaller even as its rifts become larger. He's the composer of a discomposing age…

The New York Times Book Review - Joshua Cohen

01/09/2017
This astonishing, encyclopedic, and otherwise outré meditation by Énard (Zone) on the cultural intersection of East and West takes the form of an insomniac’s obsessive imaginings—dreams, memories, and desires—which come to embody the content of a life, or perhaps several. Franz Ritter is a musicologist who, though steeped in European culture, has yearned throughout his life for the the East; its poets, cities, and sensibility. In this opium addict’s dream of a novel, we retrace Ritter’s adventures in Palmyra, where he sleeps among the Bedouin; in Istanbul, on nights spent in the company of a debauched Prussian archeologist; and in Damascus, among the ruins where Ritter searches out “the reverie and sensual sweetness of the Arabian Nights.” The erudite Ritter also recalls episodes from the lives of historical personages such as Franz Liszt, Fernando Pessoa, and the Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat, the last of whom happens to have been the subject of a dissertation by Ritter’s unrequited love object, the equally cultured Sarah. It is to thoughts of Sarah, with whom Ritter parted in Damascus, that Ritter returns most frequently, hoping to reunite with her even as actual events in the Islamic world intrude on Ritter’s fantasies of Ottomans and sultans. Though occasionally exhausting, Compass is a document of the West’s ongoing fascination with all things Oriental, richly detailed, and a cerebral triumph of learning, as well as translation. For readers who ask literature to do what history and politics cannot, unraveling nard’s arabesque yields a bounty. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/01/2017
Richly written, baroquely observant, and so terrifyingly erudite in its dizzying display of knowledge that some readers might be overwhelmed, this propulsive work explores the meaning of the Orient and the Orientalist impulse in the West, to use the narrator's historically suggestive terminology. In the opening pages, fussy, fusty Viennese musicologist Franz Ritter has taken to bed and spends a restless night recalling occasionally opium-infused memories of travel to Istanbul, Aleppo, and beyond, while also contemplating his not-quite-realized relationship with brilliant French scholar Sarah, whom he's followed around for years. The mutual influences of West and Middle East are iterated, and Franz's almost fanatical interest with the lands beyond the Mediterranean relentlessly draws us in while begging some questions. What does this fascination have to do with his attraction to melancholy and otherness, and are some travelers and scholars motivated less by understanding the region's depths than enjoying its surface dazzle? Meanwhile, the lapidary narrative is as much an unsettling portrait of a man who's missed his chance at life and love as it is a thoroughgoing study of culture. VERDICT An admirably translated Prix Goncourt winner from the author of Zone; highly recommended for sophisticated readers.

Library Journal

★ 2017-01-23
The winner of France's 2015 Prix Goncourt: a fever-dream meditation on East and West and on a lost love that binds the two worlds.Franz Ritter is an old-fashioned European neurasthenic, his lassitude helped along by artificial means: Énard's opening words, after all, are, "We are two opium smokers each in his own cloud." Indeed, and that "we" might just as well be the civilizations of Europe and the Muslim world, joined, Franz's beloved Sarah observes, by the Danube, "the river that links Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam." Don't forget Judaism, counsels Franz meaningfully. It is about the only time when Sarah, a brilliant scholar, comes up short, but meanwhile Franz has fallen ill, perhaps for one last time, wishing he had—well, among other things, a little more opium, which is not so easy to come by in the Vienna of today, at least not for a law-abiding fellow. And so he lies awake, and he ponders, and he remembers: nights in Beirut and Aleppo before the destruction, days spent among the modern ruins of the Middle East, contemplating the "mosque of the Omayyads without its minaret, its stones lying scattered in the courtyard with the broken marble." Some of Énard's novel, drawing on his own career as an Arabist and translator, speaks to might-have-been possibilities: what might happen if the two worlds got along for once? There are quiet sendups of academia, of orientalist nostalgia along the way, but mostly this is a calmly paced tour of a long history, one in which Napoleon and Hitler, Wahhabism and Wagner alike bow in and out. There are moments of quiet Arabian Nights eroticism, too: "Now that I think about it," reflects Franz, "Sarah's feet have a perfect arch, under which a small river could easily flow." And under which, it seems, the centuries and civilizations past and present might also flow as well. Lyrical and intellectually rich without ever being ponderous, reminiscent at turns of Mann's Death in Venice and Bowles' Sheltering Sky.

Kirkus Reviews