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4.21 AVERAGE
4.21 AVERAGE
A 520 page novel told in a single unending sentence (save for 3 chapters of a book being read within this book). But it is not a stream of consciousness for the following reasons.
SoC tends to be fractured and fragmentary, modelling the way the brain is presumed to work and construct thought - thoughts overlap, fall out of consciousness, clamber over one another to be the most prominent, slip through the powers of recall because of cluttered focus etc. This book is neither fractured nor fragmentary. The anecdotes & recollections are beautifully crafted, with a literary tour de force on virtually every page. Rich in metaphor, the events take their while to unwind in the narration. Yes the events do not follow a logical chronology, but they are firmly placed in history, be it medieval, the First or Second World Wars, or more recent conflicts that are being recounted. And that I think is the point, this is not an SoC (until perhaps the last ten pages when control and narrative are finally fractured as the narrator becomes unravelled), but a relentless and remorseless catalogue of the brutal horrors of war. It is so superior to the relentless and remorseless chapter of Bolano's dead women in [b:2666|63032|2666|Roberto Bolaño|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1412644327s/63032.jpg|3294830], because there is clear purpose and insight offered here.
I don't need to really add anything else except to explain that it is a litany of much of the seemingly eternal conflict that has afflicted the mediterranean from North Africa and The Middle East, through to the Balkans, Italy, Ancient Rome & Greece and Spain- an area the narrator calls "The Zone". One thing I also particularly liked was how artists were woven into the Zone's military history, from Joyce, Cervantes, Burroughs to Caravaggio.
Superlative stuff.
SoC tends to be fractured and fragmentary, modelling the way the brain is presumed to work and construct thought - thoughts overlap, fall out of consciousness, clamber over one another to be the most prominent, slip through the powers of recall because of cluttered focus etc. This book is neither fractured nor fragmentary. The anecdotes & recollections are beautifully crafted, with a literary tour de force on virtually every page. Rich in metaphor, the events take their while to unwind in the narration. Yes the events do not follow a logical chronology, but they are firmly placed in history, be it medieval, the First or Second World Wars, or more recent conflicts that are being recounted. And that I think is the point, this is not an SoC (until perhaps the last ten pages when control and narrative are finally fractured as the narrator becomes unravelled), but a relentless and remorseless catalogue of the brutal horrors of war. It is so superior to the relentless and remorseless chapter of Bolano's dead women in [b:2666|63032|2666|Roberto Bolaño|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1412644327s/63032.jpg|3294830], because there is clear purpose and insight offered here.
I don't need to really add anything else except to explain that it is a litany of much of the seemingly eternal conflict that has afflicted the mediterranean from North Africa and The Middle East, through to the Balkans, Italy, Ancient Rome & Greece and Spain- an area the narrator calls "The Zone". One thing I also particularly liked was how artists were woven into the Zone's military history, from Joyce, Cervantes, Burroughs to Caravaggio.
Superlative stuff.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
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.
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.
Francis Mirkovic, an ex fighter for Croatian independence turned French intelligence agent, is on a train from Milan to Rome, to sell his wealth of knowledge of war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers from the Zone, the Mediterranean rim, that he has criss-crossed since he gave up fighting. Hungover and coming down from amphetamines, the train draws out an endless stream of consciousness from Mirkovic, as he contemplates his actions now, and in the past, and relives the horrors and atrocities of his Zone, intermingled with the women who have gently forced love into his life of strife, nightmares and recollections.
Written as one long continuing sentence, Zone consumed me while I was reading it, to the end that I spent days engrossed in it. I quickly realised I would need to jump in at running speed to enjoy Enard’s racketing prose. Early on it reminded me of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, who himself is mentioned in the novel several times, in that the relentless drive of thoughts and stories leave you almost disorientated, yet utterly enthralled. In Under the Volcano you are drunk and left feeling hungover, Zone is slightly different, you are hungover, and the erratic thinking is how I would imagine being on or coming down from drugs would be.
It is a visceral look back at a life lived seemingly at the mercy of the current, from the Croatian war of independence to the work as as a security operative. Yet this is not a confession for redemption, while there is emotion when Mirkovic remembers his best friends from the war, or the few women that have managed to pierce his external self, it is an almost forensic examination of what has been, and what has led him to the point he’s at now, giving up himself for a fresh start.
Every now and again Mirkovic is jolted back to the train, or he recounts history and stories linked to each station en route, where he thinks about the passengers around him, or looks out of the window where he sees something that triggers another memory and he is off again, while we are breathless in his wake, slowly, carefully putting everything he has told us together, slotting it in place to understand. A completely different process from Mirkovic himself, who is almost purging himself of the Zone, and perhaps of himself, ready to fully embrace his new identity and life.
Zone is the second book I’ve read from Mathias Enard and he is fast becoming a favourite author of mine. His love affair with his own zone, the Mediterranean and near east, the captivating storytelling that intermingles with history that zooms in and out from whole conflicts to individual lives that blends together into an absorbing narrative that is as fascinating as it is beguiling.
Sadly at the moment it looks like I only have one more translated book to read, and now I’ve emerged from the Zone, I want to head straight to the Street of Thieves.
(blog review here)
Written as one long continuing sentence, Zone consumed me while I was reading it, to the end that I spent days engrossed in it. I quickly realised I would need to jump in at running speed to enjoy Enard’s racketing prose. Early on it reminded me of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, who himself is mentioned in the novel several times, in that the relentless drive of thoughts and stories leave you almost disorientated, yet utterly enthralled. In Under the Volcano you are drunk and left feeling hungover, Zone is slightly different, you are hungover, and the erratic thinking is how I would imagine being on or coming down from drugs would be.
It is a visceral look back at a life lived seemingly at the mercy of the current, from the Croatian war of independence to the work as as a security operative. Yet this is not a confession for redemption, while there is emotion when Mirkovic remembers his best friends from the war, or the few women that have managed to pierce his external self, it is an almost forensic examination of what has been, and what has led him to the point he’s at now, giving up himself for a fresh start.
Every now and again Mirkovic is jolted back to the train, or he recounts history and stories linked to each station en route, where he thinks about the passengers around him, or looks out of the window where he sees something that triggers another memory and he is off again, while we are breathless in his wake, slowly, carefully putting everything he has told us together, slotting it in place to understand. A completely different process from Mirkovic himself, who is almost purging himself of the Zone, and perhaps of himself, ready to fully embrace his new identity and life.
Zone is the second book I’ve read from Mathias Enard and he is fast becoming a favourite author of mine. His love affair with his own zone, the Mediterranean and near east, the captivating storytelling that intermingles with history that zooms in and out from whole conflicts to individual lives that blends together into an absorbing narrative that is as fascinating as it is beguiling.
Sadly at the moment it looks like I only have one more translated book to read, and now I’ve emerged from the Zone, I want to head straight to the Street of Thieves.
(blog review here)
…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.
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So hard to put down, I felt like I was holding my breath for much of the book. Grim, unpleasant, transfixing.
Ово је један силовит роман. Испричан у једном даху, у једној јединој реченици, са варљивом интерпункцијом или без ње, али то нимало не квари утисак и читање иде (зачудо) веома течно.
Френсис Сервен Мирковић француски је обавештајац (полу-Хрват, полу-Француз) чије је оперативно поље тзв. „Зона“, односно простор Средоземног мора тј. све што може да се подведе под појам Медитеран.
Mare Nostrum оивичено је вековним насиљем са свих страна, а Франсис се не либи да то насиље оправдава, потпомаже или, чак и сам врши, за свој или државни рачун, мање је важно. Много података и догађаја је обухваћено, од Тројанског рата, освајања Константинопоља, Битке код Лепанта, Алжирског рата за независност, усташких злочина у Другом светском рату, све до палестинско-израелских конфликата, немира у арапском свету, грађанског рата у Југославији... Стотине година замршене и насилне историје је стало у ово „свођење рачуна“.
Свих тих акција и догађаја Френсис се присећа током једног ноћног путовања возом од Милана до Рима, у вечери када је одлучио да је са тим „шпијунским“ животом готово и кад жели да побегне од њега. Са собом носи кофер са „прљавим“ подацима и тајнама које планира да прода Ватикану. Сећања теку исцепкано, лако се пребацује из садашњости у прошлост, своју или туђу, све у ритму воза у покрету.
Видљива је велика ерудиција аутора и одлично познавање поднебља које описује.
У тело романа уметнута су и 2-3 поглавља из фиктивне књиге фиктивног либанског писца Рафаела Кахле (то је литература коју наш путник чита у возу). Можда је могло и без тога, али никако ми то није умањило уживање у читању.
Свакако вреди прочитати.
Френсис Сервен Мирковић француски је обавештајац (полу-Хрват, полу-Француз) чије је оперативно поље тзв. „Зона“, односно простор Средоземног мора тј. све што може да се подведе под појам Медитеран.
Mare Nostrum оивичено је вековним насиљем са свих страна, а Франсис се не либи да то насиље оправдава, потпомаже или, чак и сам врши, за свој или државни рачун, мање је важно. Много података и догађаја је обухваћено, од Тројанског рата, освајања Константинопоља, Битке код Лепанта, Алжирског рата за независност, усташких злочина у Другом светском рату, све до палестинско-израелских конфликата, немира у арапском свету, грађанског рата у Југославији... Стотине година замршене и насилне историје је стало у ово „свођење рачуна“.
Свих тих акција и догађаја Френсис се присећа током једног ноћног путовања возом од Милана до Рима, у вечери када је одлучио да је са тим „шпијунским“ животом готово и кад жели да побегне од њега. Са собом носи кофер са „прљавим“ подацима и тајнама које планира да прода Ватикану. Сећања теку исцепкано, лако се пребацује из садашњости у прошлост, своју или туђу, све у ритму воза у покрету.
Видљива је велика ерудиција аутора и одлично познавање поднебља које описује.
У тело романа уметнута су и 2-3 поглавља из фиктивне књиге фиктивног либанског писца Рафаела Кахле (то је литература коју наш путник чита у возу). Можда је могло и без тога, али никако ми то није умањило уживање у читању.
Свакако вреди прочитати.