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melanie_reads's review against another edition
5.0
It's not just one long sentence for the hell of it, so is the protaganist's life one long sentence. Very intersting way to explain the connectedness of it all - and by all, I mean the world.
harimau_belang's review against another edition
5.0
Looking at the Tripadvisor forums, tourists who plan a road trip from the medieval fortress of Dubrovnik to other parts of Croatia will find plenty answers for a seemingly weird question: whether to take a ferry or to drive through 20 km of Bosnia and Herzegovina's territory. While there is no explanation on the forums as for why a small Bosnian seaside town of Neum splits Croatia into two, one could, if one is curious enough, travel backward 300 years in time and 450 km northward to Sremski Karlovci, the site of the Treaty of Karlowitz. According to the treaty, signed on 1699, the Ottoman Empire was to cede a large swath of the Dalmatian coast to the city-state of Venice, leaving its military and economic rival, the city-state of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, vulnerable from Venetian influence. Thus, the wise councils of the city executed a land sale on the northern and southern border so that Dubrovnik is inside the protective embrace of a bigger power, the Ottoman Empire. The south side, Sutorina, became part of Montenegro. The north side, Neum, is integrated into the region that is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, setting a precedence for the border, the definition of which other future treaties would follow. Today Neum cuts Croatia into what one can see on a map as a broken sickle.
The territory bordering the Mediterranian Sea, the estuary of world's empires, is the namesake zone of Mathias Enard's daring novel. From Barcelona to Beirut, Algiers to Zagreb, Rome to Jerusalem, this Zone is laden with history, with layers and layers of conflicts, treaties, and displacements. In this territory, the past is ever present. A peculiarity, such as that of the seaside town of Neum, is a consequence of a blot of ink stroke by a pen of a distant power from distant past. So strong is the gravitational pull of history in the Zone that if one could see the layers of the past juxtaposed with the present, one cannot help but feel a nauseating claustrophobia.
Francis Servain Mirković is one such man. A French from Croatian descent. A troubled man, a dedicated alcoholic, a French Intelligence Services agent who is planning to defect. He carries dossiers of war criminals, terrorists, and warmongers active in the Zone in a suitcase handcuffed to the luggage rack inside a high-speed train traveling from Milan to Rome. While the train makes its journey through the suburb of Milan, by the industrial complex near Parma, across the river Arno, Francis's mind, too, makes a trip through time and across places haunted by conflicts. This act of remembering that comprises this book takes the form of a single sentence, 520 pages long.
One of the usages of language is to transform a web of thought into words which, chosen and ordered judiciously, transport the meaning and the feeling of such thoughts. Consider then, the words spawned by a man under the influence of both substance and the horrors of human civilization. Throughout the pages, there are stories about the devastating results of wars, battles, conflicts, and compromises, ancient and modern, as a result of his profession and his side obsession as an amateur historian. One of the many similar passages that become the motif of this novel reads as follow:
The memory is an excellent construct. The act of remembering facilitates the moving and going from the here and now to the far and before, carrying a wealth of information during the transfer. For a novel that deals with the permanence of history, the ubiquitous juxtaposition of the past into the present creates an illusion of no time, which it renders successfully. Except for the historical anecdotes, there is no assurance about the time and place in which the narrative of the remembering occurs. But slowly, little by little, the clear picture of Francis's history emerges, and with it also the comprehension about Zone's history.
Mathias Enard employs juxtaposition as the modus operandi. Several binary comparisons provide clues about the heart of the novel. Personal memory and collective history. Francis remembering of his youthful fascination with Neo-Nazi is presented side by side with the history of Croatia and its role in the Yugoslavian Wars. War and Art. Homeric reference peppers the remembering of Francis's time serving the Croatian cause during the war of its independence. The West and The East. The camps, railways, and methodic horrors of Nazi Germany are compared and contrasted with the Palestinian flight from their homes. Love and War. How the horrors of war curtail his ability to function as a human being, destroying his hopes of meaningful relationships. Identity and history. How the act of remembering imbues the sense of identity, creating a spiral of violence that feeds to historical atrocity, victim creating victims. To understand the Yugoslavian Wars twenty years ago, one should travel back in time another one or two centuries to the great rivalries between Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire. Or back to the beginning, the war between the Greek heroes from the West and the Trojans, whose ruins can be found in modern Turkey. The Roman Western and Eastern Empire. The Holy League and The Ottoman Empire. The West and ISIS.
It takes only 20 minutes to drive the Bosnian and Herzegovinan Neum corridor. During the time you can look to the west, to the brilliant sapphire of the Adriatic Sea or you can look to the east, to the solemn mountains of Bosnia. The hum of the car, the latest hits from your iPhone eclipse the distant salvos of the Siege of Sarajevo, thirty years and 250 km away. To the south, the Arab Spring is farther, but more recent. Far into the West, the victory over Granada, the Alhambra Decree, and the Spanish Civil War is almost unnoticeable. Behind the mountains of Bosnia, towards the East, the tragedy of Aleppo regularly fills the airwaves. In the Zone, history is ever present.
Brilliant, propulsive, a novel of ideas, Zone is clearly a masterpiece of modern writing.
The territory bordering the Mediterranian Sea, the estuary of world's empires, is the namesake zone of Mathias Enard's daring novel. From Barcelona to Beirut, Algiers to Zagreb, Rome to Jerusalem, this Zone is laden with history, with layers and layers of conflicts, treaties, and displacements. In this territory, the past is ever present. A peculiarity, such as that of the seaside town of Neum, is a consequence of a blot of ink stroke by a pen of a distant power from distant past. So strong is the gravitational pull of history in the Zone that if one could see the layers of the past juxtaposed with the present, one cannot help but feel a nauseating claustrophobia.
Francis Servain Mirković is one such man. A French from Croatian descent. A troubled man, a dedicated alcoholic, a French Intelligence Services agent who is planning to defect. He carries dossiers of war criminals, terrorists, and warmongers active in the Zone in a suitcase handcuffed to the luggage rack inside a high-speed train traveling from Milan to Rome. While the train makes its journey through the suburb of Milan, by the industrial complex near Parma, across the river Arno, Francis's mind, too, makes a trip through time and across places haunted by conflicts. This act of remembering that comprises this book takes the form of a single sentence, 520 pages long.
One of the usages of language is to transform a web of thought into words which, chosen and ordered judiciously, transport the meaning and the feeling of such thoughts. Consider then, the words spawned by a man under the influence of both substance and the horrors of human civilization. Throughout the pages, there are stories about the devastating results of wars, battles, conflicts, and compromises, ancient and modern, as a result of his profession and his side obsession as an amateur historian. One of the many similar passages that become the motif of this novel reads as follow:
... this landscape eroded by the Lombard twilight illuminated suddenly by the Lodi train station: the Lodi bridge over the Adda must not be far away, during the first Italian campaign, not long before going to Egypt, Bonaparte too fought there—... a column of 6,000 grenadiers charges on the carpet of their own corpses fallen to the rhythm of the Austrian salvos, in the middle of the bridge they hesitate Lannes the little dyer from Gers advances shouts and with sword drawn at the head of his men emerges onto the opposite shore facing the enemy gunners seized with panic the French forge a path for themselves through the lines with their swords as the cavalry having forded the river upstream massacres the panicking Croats, 2,000 killed and wounded, 2,000 Hapsburgians fallen in a few hours lie strewn across the river's shore, 2,000 bodies that the Lombard peasants will strip of their valuables, baptismal medals, silver of enamel snuffboxes, in the midst of the death rattles of the dying and the wounded on that night of 21 Floreal 1796 Year IV of the Revolution 2,000 ghosts 2,000 shades like so many shapes behind my window..."
The memory is an excellent construct. The act of remembering facilitates the moving and going from the here and now to the far and before, carrying a wealth of information during the transfer. For a novel that deals with the permanence of history, the ubiquitous juxtaposition of the past into the present creates an illusion of no time, which it renders successfully. Except for the historical anecdotes, there is no assurance about the time and place in which the narrative of the remembering occurs. But slowly, little by little, the clear picture of Francis's history emerges, and with it also the comprehension about Zone's history.
Mathias Enard employs juxtaposition as the modus operandi. Several binary comparisons provide clues about the heart of the novel. Personal memory and collective history. Francis remembering of his youthful fascination with Neo-Nazi is presented side by side with the history of Croatia and its role in the Yugoslavian Wars. War and Art. Homeric reference peppers the remembering of Francis's time serving the Croatian cause during the war of its independence. The West and The East. The camps, railways, and methodic horrors of Nazi Germany are compared and contrasted with the Palestinian flight from their homes. Love and War. How the horrors of war curtail his ability to function as a human being, destroying his hopes of meaningful relationships. Identity and history. How the act of remembering imbues the sense of identity, creating a spiral of violence that feeds to historical atrocity, victim creating victims. To understand the Yugoslavian Wars twenty years ago, one should travel back in time another one or two centuries to the great rivalries between Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire. Or back to the beginning, the war between the Greek heroes from the West and the Trojans, whose ruins can be found in modern Turkey. The Roman Western and Eastern Empire. The Holy League and The Ottoman Empire. The West and ISIS.
It takes only 20 minutes to drive the Bosnian and Herzegovinan Neum corridor. During the time you can look to the west, to the brilliant sapphire of the Adriatic Sea or you can look to the east, to the solemn mountains of Bosnia. The hum of the car, the latest hits from your iPhone eclipse the distant salvos of the Siege of Sarajevo, thirty years and 250 km away. To the south, the Arab Spring is farther, but more recent. Far into the West, the victory over Granada, the Alhambra Decree, and the Spanish Civil War is almost unnoticeable. Behind the mountains of Bosnia, towards the East, the tragedy of Aleppo regularly fills the airwaves. In the Zone, history is ever present.
Brilliant, propulsive, a novel of ideas, Zone is clearly a masterpiece of modern writing.
drewsof's review against another edition
4.0
This one is tough to pin down and properly consider. It's a difficult read, for sure: the bulk of the novel, with the exception of three short chapters "from another novel", are written without periods in a loping stream of consciousness - and it truly feels like you've been dropped in Francis' head, for better or worse. This isn't Joyce or Woolf or somebody being fancy, this is genuinely the rambling way our brains behave. To top it off, Énard is writing a kind of spiritual sequel to the works of Camus by putting us in the head of a bad person and hoping that we'll come along on the journey. Is Francis redeemable? Is his end goal enough to wipe his slate clean? And do we hope for that, for him?
It's a heavy, heady book and I wasn't always the most engrossed - but when I was, by god, I tore through this faster than the dense walls of text should ever have allowed. A novel unlike any other, to be sure, and one that I think may linger longer than I'd've guessed.
It's a heavy, heady book and I wasn't always the most engrossed - but when I was, by god, I tore through this faster than the dense walls of text should ever have allowed. A novel unlike any other, to be sure, and one that I think may linger longer than I'd've guessed.
leifq's review
5.0
Whew... Ok
I'll start where all readers of this book are contractually obligated to start which is the one-sentence structure. First of all, it isn't really a single sentence as it's really just a standard structure but with punctuation and paragraph breaks removed - a 500+ page run-on sentence is more accurate (the distinction being that Enard doesn't go through acrobatics to make sure that this is a grammatically correct single sentence) and being thus, your brain adjusts after a few pages and reads the book as if the punctuation and breaks were there. Second, it's absolutely additive to the experience, both structurally (the overriding conceit being that the main character is traveling on a high-speed train while remembering the action of the novel) and philosophically where the repetitive violence human beings commit against each other has the effect of making different areas and different times bleed into one-another. The run-on nature of the structure mirrors the "house-of-mirrors" maze humanity's war against each has always been
There is no narrative arc and very little plot to speak of but the effect this book had on me was as that of the greats that I have read (2666 and Blood Meridian come easily to mind given the content) if it ultimately fell short of most of those
This book felt important and will, I believe, stick with me longer than most - a recommendation without reservation
I'll start where all readers of this book are contractually obligated to start which is the one-sentence structure. First of all, it isn't really a single sentence as it's really just a standard structure but with punctuation and paragraph breaks removed - a 500+ page run-on sentence is more accurate (the distinction being that Enard doesn't go through acrobatics to make sure that this is a grammatically correct single sentence) and being thus, your brain adjusts after a few pages and reads the book as if the punctuation and breaks were there. Second, it's absolutely additive to the experience, both structurally (the overriding conceit being that the main character is traveling on a high-speed train while remembering the action of the novel) and philosophically where the repetitive violence human beings commit against each other has the effect of making different areas and different times bleed into one-another. The run-on nature of the structure mirrors the "house-of-mirrors" maze humanity's war against each has always been
There is no narrative arc and very little plot to speak of but the effect this book had on me was as that of the greats that I have read (2666 and Blood Meridian come easily to mind given the content) if it ultimately fell short of most of those
This book felt important and will, I believe, stick with me longer than most - a recommendation without reservation
quintusmarcus's review
5.0
This is one of the very few novels that I have finished and wanted to turn around and read over again right away. There is a real challenge in trying to describe the cumulative power of this tremendous novel: although there is little change in register or intensity, the weight of the story builds and builds, becoming almost unbearable. The narrator travels by train from Milan to Rome, carrying a briefcase of documents detailing the history of violence in the Zone (the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Italy, Greece, and so on). In the course of a single night, and a single 517 page paragraphless sentence, the narrator relates the history of violence in the Zone throughout the 20th century, and his complicity in that violence.
His subject is captured in one characteristic passage--he writes of
"...Mostar crushed by shells to Venice with the handsome Ghassan and Ezra Pound the mad, to Trieste to the cursed villa of Herzog von Auschwitz, to Beirut with the fierce Palestinians to Algiers the white to lick the blood of martyrs or the burnt wounds of the innocent men tortured by my father, to Tangier with Burroughs the wild-eyed murderer Genet the luminous invert and Choukri the eternally starving, to Taormina to get drunk with Lowry, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Marseille with my grandmother in love with crowned heads, to Split with Vlaho the disabled, to Alexandria the sleeping, to Salonika city of ghosts or to the White Island graveyard of heroes, what would Yvan Deroy the mad do where would he go I watch the Americans having fun talking loudly in the restaurant car, outside the countryside is still just as dark as Antonio the bartender is preparing to close his mobile bar we're going to be there soon, and then what, what are you going to do..."
There is no consolation in this book, and little hope. The burning intensity of the novel builds, page after page, in prose that is truly hypnotic. Page after page of atrocity plays out, and to what end? The author has no answers: all he has to offer is observation and reporting: memory.
This is a challenging but deeply rewarding book to read--very highly recommended.
arirang's review
4.0
"...Rome where all roads lead before being lost in the night what will I do you're always tempted to retrace your steps to go back to where you lived, the way Caravaggio painter of decapitation wanted to see Rome again, despite the luxury of Malta the rotting beauty of Naples, constantly and ceaselessly Caravaggio desired the Eternal City the shady neighbourhoods the cutthroats around the mausoleum of Augustus the casual lovers games brawls laughable life where I will go back to, me, to Mostar crushed by the shells to Venice with the handsome Ghassan and Ezra Pound the mad, to Trieste to the cursed villa of the Herzog von Auschwitz, to Beirut with the fierce Palestinians to Algeirs the white to lick the blood of martyrs or the burnt wounds of the innocent men tortured by my father, to Tangier with Burroughs the wild-eyed murdered Genet the luminous invert and Choukri the eternally starving, to Taormina to get drunk with Lowry, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Marseille with my grandmother in love with crowned heads, to Split with Vlaho the disabled, to Alexandria the sleeping, to Salonika city of ghosts or to the White Island graveyard of heroes..."
The one thing everyone knows about Mathias Énard's Zone is that it is a507 521 page (1 for every km of the narrator's train journey from Milan to Rome) single sentence. Except in reality it isn't. The text is broken into 24 chapters (actually 23 as Chapter XVI seems to be missing - a typographical error or of artistic significance? I suspect the former) and while each chapter starts mid-sentence it doesn't leave off exactly where the last ended. Within chapters as well commas serve to punctuate the text - as per the extract above.
The overall effect works well - the novel is much more readable than the description might suggest, and yet the reader is sucked into the rhythm of the narration, mirroring that of the train journey, such that one has to consciously pause for breath - usually to follow up one of the many references to history and literature.
Zone is narrated by Francis Servian Mirkovic, a French-Croatian, currently working for the French secret service, but with a shady past in the Croatian right-wing militia. He is on the last leg of a journey to Rome where he plans to sell secrets he has gathered during his intelligence work to the Vatican and then take on a new identity and life.
Mirkovic's opening line, in the original, is “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme", rendered in English as "everything is harder once you reach man's estate" (a Twelfth Night reference, not present in the original but agreed with the author as better than a literal translation), and we increasingly see that Mirkovic is at a cross-roads in his life. He describes his early right-wing leaning as mere youthful infatuation ("I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist”) and appears rather detached from the war in which he fought, but a more complex picture emerges over the second half of the novel - and one becomes increasingly uneasy about what really awaits him in Rome.
Mirkovic's intelligence speciality is the Zone - the area around the mediterranean from Barcelona to Beirut - but while his professional interest is in the present day, his personal interest, and briefcase of documents, extend further back in time. His thoughts during the journey span Troy, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hannibal, the Battle of Lepanto, Napoleon, the 1st World War, Spanish Civil War, 2nd World War, Lebanese civil war, and the Croatian conflicts of the 90s, and that's all in the first 100 pages. Indeed Énard devotes the novel to "the witnesses, victims or killers, in Barcelona, Beirut, Damascus, Zagreb, Algeirs, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Rome, Trieste, Istanbul."
Mirkovic's (via Énard) also has a highly literally take on "the Zone", and in particular authors as well known for their life in the Zone and/or political views as their literary output. Explicit influences, to name a few, include Tsirkas’ Drifting Cities, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Apollinaire’s Zone, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and the right-wing Maurice Bardeche's Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne.
Amongst the many historical figures that he considers, he appears to have a particular fascination with José Millán Astray, Francoist founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, best known for his "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!" proclamation - Mirkovic doesn't share his apparent scorn for intelligence, but does share his fascination with death. Indeed it is the association with starting his journey in Milan that sparks Mirkovic's 500+ page stream of thoughts
Zone has been wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mendell, who seems to specialise in long and difficult translations from the German (notably the 1000 page Les Bienveillantes, a terrible novel but an excellent translation).
Overall an extremely impressive novel, much more readable than advance publicity might suggest.
-----------------
As an addendum to my review, Chapter XVI really was missing in my copy - and many thanks to the publisher )https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/37533721-jacques-testard) who got in touch and sent me a revised version. It says something - positive actually - about Zone that a missing 14 page chapter didn't disrupt the narration at all!
The one thing everyone knows about Mathias Énard's Zone is that it is a
The overall effect works well - the novel is much more readable than the description might suggest, and yet the reader is sucked into the rhythm of the narration, mirroring that of the train journey, such that one has to consciously pause for breath - usually to follow up one of the many references to history and literature.
Zone is narrated by Francis Servian Mirkovic, a French-Croatian, currently working for the French secret service, but with a shady past in the Croatian right-wing militia. He is on the last leg of a journey to Rome where he plans to sell secrets he has gathered during his intelligence work to the Vatican and then take on a new identity and life.
Mirkovic's opening line, in the original, is “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme", rendered in English as "everything is harder once you reach man's estate" (a Twelfth Night reference, not present in the original but agreed with the author as better than a literal translation), and we increasingly see that Mirkovic is at a cross-roads in his life. He describes his early right-wing leaning as mere youthful infatuation ("I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist”) and appears rather detached from the war in which he fought, but a more complex picture emerges over the second half of the novel - and one becomes increasingly uneasy about what really awaits him in Rome.
Mirkovic's intelligence speciality is the Zone - the area around the mediterranean from Barcelona to Beirut - but while his professional interest is in the present day, his personal interest, and briefcase of documents, extend further back in time. His thoughts during the journey span Troy, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hannibal, the Battle of Lepanto, Napoleon, the 1st World War, Spanish Civil War, 2nd World War, Lebanese civil war, and the Croatian conflicts of the 90s, and that's all in the first 100 pages. Indeed Énard devotes the novel to "the witnesses, victims or killers, in Barcelona, Beirut, Damascus, Zagreb, Algeirs, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Rome, Trieste, Istanbul."
Mirkovic's (via Énard) also has a highly literally take on "the Zone", and in particular authors as well known for their life in the Zone and/or political views as their literary output. Explicit influences, to name a few, include Tsirkas’ Drifting Cities, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Apollinaire’s Zone, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and the right-wing Maurice Bardeche's Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne.
Amongst the many historical figures that he considers, he appears to have a particular fascination with José Millán Astray, Francoist founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, best known for his "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!" proclamation - Mirkovic doesn't share his apparent scorn for intelligence, but does share his fascination with death. Indeed it is the association with starting his journey in Milan that sparks Mirkovic's 500+ page stream of thoughts
Zone has been wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mendell, who seems to specialise in long and difficult translations from the German (notably the 1000 page Les Bienveillantes, a terrible novel but an excellent translation).
Overall an extremely impressive novel, much more readable than advance publicity might suggest.
-----------------
As an addendum to my review, Chapter XVI really was missing in my copy - and many thanks to the publisher )https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/37533721-jacques-testard) who got in touch and sent me a revised version. It says something - positive actually - about Zone that a missing 14 page chapter didn't disrupt the narration at all!
kdrmbroms's review
4.0
.................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.....................
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