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4.21 AVERAGE
4.21 AVERAGE
Did a review of this book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwfC8VgfKVo
I’d like to say due to family medical issues, lack of sleep, and time since I read this that the following review will not be up to the usual standards you have come to avoid, but all that will probably make it better than you’re used to (from me)…
In looking back through my notes, having a few weeks to reflect on this book, the one thing I wrote that resonates even stronger today is that I felt this book was gripping, but not exactly enjoyable. You’re essentially along for the ride on a train that crosses not just part of Italy but seemingly the entire history of Western violence and warfare in the process. The destination is Rome where our guilt-ridden narrator plans to auction off the files he has enumerating the atrocities of the “Zone” (loosely, the lands of the Mediterranean) name-by-name . And while hurtling toward this destination, we intersect the past at every thought and train-window-framed scene, crossing quite physically over the dead and lost. Love and art offer some just out-of-reach salvation, but sometimes one’s past has caused lacerations so deep or wide, that no human contact, much less mediated artifice will ever suture.
When it comes to processing and surviving combat and associated horrors, our minds perform the type of partitioning we’ve structured computers to use—a walling off between spaces or type of storage to protect one from the other, to allow a certain level of functioning. But in the human mind, the trauma eventually seeps through, the partition degrades and an inevitable reckoning must ensue. Former soldier Mirkovic has gone from combatant in the Balkan wars to a type of accountant spy. And this train ride unleashes both a torrent of guilt for his own participation in the past and a philosophic delving into battle stretching back to at least the Trojan War. His thoughts wander and jump and yet somehow feel biblical in that elongated-listing style, questioning whether history could have taken different turns, showing us how closely war almost robbed us of Cervantes and wondering whether fate would have merely substituted another genius in his place. And just like this review, there’s a kind of desperate reaching to make sense of it all, to grasp in one’s hands the totality of amorphous truth that inevitably slips between the fingers. One would settle for the brief respite offered by the embrace of a lover had not Mirkovic’s PTSD scared most of them off.
Books like this give the past a kind of present virility as the future is forced to face its bloody origins. In this sense, it reminded me a bit of HHhH (Binet) and the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Marías). There’s a compelling momentum to the narration and you’re not sure whether the thought of this proverbial train finally reaching its destination elicits pure relief or terror.
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Originally, I was going to try to write this with the intention of you reading it while listening to Bjork’s “Amphibian”—I was going to conjure up from the dead the many references and allusions Énard makes and those ghosts were going to haunt the two of us together. But then my cats mobbed me for dereliction of food-bowl-refill duty and I lost whatever magic thought I had that was supposed to perform this semi-miraculous performance art review concept. But if you close your eyes and take a long slow breath, I promise you the weight of history will pull ever so slightly at your eyelids and the screams of the dead will murmur in the slight ringing of your ears.
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WORDS & REFERENCES I SHOULD HAVE LOOKED UP BUT STILL HAVEN’T
Franjo Tudman | Scripta Minoa | Threnody | condottierre | caudal | verger | aspergillum | Chryseis | fellaghas | Ustashis | enucleation | obol | glaive | catafalque | viaticum
In looking back through my notes, having a few weeks to reflect on this book, the one thing I wrote that resonates even stronger today is that I felt this book was gripping, but not exactly enjoyable. You’re essentially along for the ride on a train that crosses not just part of Italy but seemingly the entire history of Western violence and warfare in the process. The destination is Rome where our guilt-ridden narrator plans to auction off the files he has enumerating the atrocities of the “Zone” (loosely, the lands of the Mediterranean) name-by-name . And while hurtling toward this destination, we intersect the past at every thought and train-window-framed scene, crossing quite physically over the dead and lost. Love and art offer some just out-of-reach salvation, but sometimes one’s past has caused lacerations so deep or wide, that no human contact, much less mediated artifice will ever suture.
When it comes to processing and surviving combat and associated horrors, our minds perform the type of partitioning we’ve structured computers to use—a walling off between spaces or type of storage to protect one from the other, to allow a certain level of functioning. But in the human mind, the trauma eventually seeps through, the partition degrades and an inevitable reckoning must ensue. Former soldier Mirkovic has gone from combatant in the Balkan wars to a type of accountant spy. And this train ride unleashes both a torrent of guilt for his own participation in the past and a philosophic delving into battle stretching back to at least the Trojan War. His thoughts wander and jump and yet somehow feel biblical in that elongated-listing style, questioning whether history could have taken different turns, showing us how closely war almost robbed us of Cervantes and wondering whether fate would have merely substituted another genius in his place. And just like this review, there’s a kind of desperate reaching to make sense of it all, to grasp in one’s hands the totality of amorphous truth that inevitably slips between the fingers. One would settle for the brief respite offered by the embrace of a lover had not Mirkovic’s PTSD scared most of them off.
Books like this give the past a kind of present virility as the future is forced to face its bloody origins. In this sense, it reminded me a bit of HHhH (Binet) and the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Marías). There’s a compelling momentum to the narration and you’re not sure whether the thought of this proverbial train finally reaching its destination elicits pure relief or terror.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Originally, I was going to try to write this with the intention of you reading it while listening to Bjork’s “Amphibian”—I was going to conjure up from the dead the many references and allusions Énard makes and those ghosts were going to haunt the two of us together. But then my cats mobbed me for dereliction of food-bowl-refill duty and I lost whatever magic thought I had that was supposed to perform this semi-miraculous performance art review concept. But if you close your eyes and take a long slow breath, I promise you the weight of history will pull ever so slightly at your eyelids and the screams of the dead will murmur in the slight ringing of your ears.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORDS & REFERENCES I SHOULD HAVE LOOKED UP BUT STILL HAVEN’T
Franjo Tudman | Scripta Minoa | Threnody | condottierre | caudal | verger | aspergillum | Chryseis | fellaghas | Ustashis | enucleation | obol | glaive | catafalque | viaticum
I think that if I had read Zone first before Compass, it would have felt like a development in his shtick, but I did it backwards and so it felt sort of like, well, a schtick. It's beautiful and well-written, but I can only read one of these opuses at a time.
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.
Rovinj, Croatia.
Zone - Mathias Énard's extraordinary 517-page novel written in one churning, horrifying gush of a sentence. Oh, yes, we spend the entire novel inside the head of seasoned spy Francis Servain Mirković, listening to his turbulent internal monologue, occasionally punctuated by nested stories, as he travels by train from Milan to Rome to sell information to the Vatican - a list of names and details from years of extreme violence in the Zone, that is, the Mediterranean region stretching all the way from Spain to Syria, with a particular focus on Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia, and his homeland of Croatia.
"you don't forget much in the end, the wrinkled hands of Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Batavian, his trembling mustache, the faces of Islamists tortured in the Qanatar Prison, the photograph of the severed heads of the Tibhirine monks, the reflections on the cupolas in Jerusalem, Marianne naked facing the sea, the squeals of Andrija's pig, the bodies piled up in the gas trucks of Chelmno, Stéphanie the sorrowful in front of Hagia Sophia, Sashka with her brushes and paints in Rome, my mother at the piano in Madrid, her Bach fugue in front of an audience of Croatian and Spanish patriots, so many images linked by an uninterrupted thread that snakes like a railroad bypassing a city..."
Mirković blends deeply personal experiences with bloody, tortured historical events, and intertwines them with literature and the arts. All of this floats freely in the spy's consciousness, expressed, as noted above, in one continuous sentence. And, as Stephen Burn pointed out in his New York Times review, Mathias Énard may be using the English word "sentence" not only as a grammatical construction but also as an act of judgment, akin to a jail sentence. In this case, the events taken as a totality within the novel pass judgment on 20th-century Western civilization, measured out in collective guilt and shame.
“I slept with Marianne, she got undressed in the bathroom, she had a body, a face to rend your soul and mine asked for nothing but that, in the scent of the Alexandrian rain and sea I got drunk on Marianne's fragrances...” Mirković speaks of a “search of a love, a gaze,” an event that will tear him from the endless circling, release him from the Wheel, “a meeting, anything to escape yourself.” At another point, he sees himself in orbit. “I have been split in two then in the war and crushed like a tiny meteor.”
There's a good bit of irony here. Mirković yearns for release from the wheel of Samsara, from the world of illusion. Having been split in two and crushed by war, suffering from PTSD that he attempts to drown out by continually plying himself with drugs and booze, he would dearly love to be made whole. But how? Does he expect his new life with a new woman, Sashka the artist, to be the answer? According to enlightenment traditions such as Buddhism, if he truly became serious about effecting a release from anxiety, craving, hatred, and delusion, he'd go off, either in isolation or as part of a spiritual community.
"curious this passion for reading, a remnant from Venice, from Marianne great devourer of books, a way to forget to disappear wholly into paper, little by little I replaced adventure novels with simple novels, Conrad's fault, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness, one title calls for another, and maybe without really understanding, who knows, I let myself be carried away, page by page...there is nothing I desire more than a novel, where the people and characters, a play of masks and desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the paragraphs, dialogues, adventures..."
Many are the references to writers and literature sprinkled throughout the novel's pages. We're even given hints that Mirković himself would like to tell his story in writing. For me, this was surely a most appealing and uplifting part of Zone. And when I read, “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,” I linked the narrator's vivid, hideous, dreadful images with three novels I've read and reviewed from the Eastern European Zone: Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić (Bosnia), Absolution by Aleš Šteger (Slovania), and A Handful of Sand by Marinko Košče (Croatia). The underlying message: war and violence are never the answer.
"for us the collective stems from the story of individual suffering, the place of the dead, of corpses, it's not Croatia that's bleeding it's the Croats, our country is where its graves are, our murderers, the murderers on the other side of the mirror are biding their time, and they will come, they will come because they have already come, because we have already gone to cut their ears to a point, put our stakes in their wives' stomachs and tear out their eyes, a great wave of screaming blind men will cry for revenge, will come defend their graves and the bones of their dead..."
Reading passages like this, is it any wonder Zone, like Homer's Illiad, is divided into 24 bloody chapters and we're given the sense Ares or Mars, the god of war, continues to reign havoc over the lands within the Zone. Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised that Mirković reflects, "I was no longer inside myself I was in the Bardo the waiting room of wandering souls." True, the narrator is on a train traveling in Odyssey mode rather than actively engaged in Illiad war mode, but, and this is a critical point, the corpse strewn fields still fill his mind - in a very real sense, he's the embodiment of the unending murders, tortures, and war within the Zone.
Mathias Énard has written a propulsive novel, once started, nearly impossible to put down. It is an erudite and ambitious literary work articulated in an unforgettable voice. Special thanks to Charlotte Mandell for her splendid translation.
Mathias Énard, born 1972 - photo taken around 2008, publication date of Zone, when the French author was 38-years-old
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Francis Servain was born to a cultivated Croatian mother in exile and a French engineer haunted by his murky actions during the Algerian War. Influenced by neo-fascist identity politics and his grandfather's own involvement in the Ustaša movement, Servain, at a young age, returned to his ancestral homeland and fought for a free Croatia during the Bosnian Civil War. After finally fleeing the genocide and senseless chaos, he joined French intelligence and began to specialize in underworld networking throughout the "Zone" - that volatile region surrounding the Mediterranean. From Israel and the West Bank, to Libya and Lebanon and Turkey, to Spain and Syria, Servain became intimately acquainted with an ongoing cycle of violence perpetually spawning new violence in a never-ending dance of death dating back to the mythological histories of Greece and Rome. He has left all this behind now and changed his name so they can't find him. He is on a train in Italy heading to Rome with a suitcase full of names, beginning with an old Nazi living in Egypt. He is taking this suitcase to the Vatican, hoping for some kind of absolution.
Zone is bleak. It is a litany of atrocities strongly reminiscent of "The Part About the Crimes" in Bolaño's 2666. It is also a single, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentence, nearly five hundred pages long and interrupted only by two excerpts of a novel-within-a-novel about a female Palestinian in Beirut in 1978, on the eve of its fall to the Israelis. Although it is never stated outright, Servain is clearly plagued by PTSD, as seen in his inability to stop the memory reel no matter how much alcohol he consumes. But The Sentence is more than just a recitation of Servain's knowledge, feelings, and experiences. It is also a textual manifestation of war with no end or perhaps a Matryoshka doll - one individual's gruesome past, uncovered, reveals links to other conflicts in other countries. Zone is ultimately a protest against man's continuing folly. It is not so much that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" as it is simply that history is maybe the only thing left alive. History - collective and personal - inspires the ideologies and other excuses people use. The greatest force of them all is probably vengeance.
"It says 'Death' on every page," says one critical review of 2666. ". . . The bleakness of Bolaño's vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it." You can make the same charge against Zone as well. Énard's unrelenting focus on war in a single sentence of over 500 pages borders on repetition and nearly becomes exhausting. But maybe that was his intention. Reading about war is trying; try living it. I'm not sure Zone really has a point, at least not a redemptive one. What I did get out of it, though, was a sense of horror not only at what people go through but at what they put themselves through. Zone is closer to a documentary than a work of fiction (Énard's research included journalists, historians, and filmmakers) and I think that's how it should be approached. It's not holiday reading, that's for sure.
Review Copy
Original Review
Zone is bleak. It is a litany of atrocities strongly reminiscent of "The Part About the Crimes" in Bolaño's 2666. It is also a single, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentence, nearly five hundred pages long and interrupted only by two excerpts of a novel-within-a-novel about a female Palestinian in Beirut in 1978, on the eve of its fall to the Israelis. Although it is never stated outright, Servain is clearly plagued by PTSD, as seen in his inability to stop the memory reel no matter how much alcohol he consumes. But The Sentence is more than just a recitation of Servain's knowledge, feelings, and experiences. It is also a textual manifestation of war with no end or perhaps a Matryoshka doll - one individual's gruesome past, uncovered, reveals links to other conflicts in other countries. Zone is ultimately a protest against man's continuing folly. It is not so much that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" as it is simply that history is maybe the only thing left alive. History - collective and personal - inspires the ideologies and other excuses people use. The greatest force of them all is probably vengeance.
"It says 'Death' on every page," says one critical review of 2666. ". . . The bleakness of Bolaño's vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it." You can make the same charge against Zone as well. Énard's unrelenting focus on war in a single sentence of over 500 pages borders on repetition and nearly becomes exhausting. But maybe that was his intention. Reading about war is trying; try living it. I'm not sure Zone really has a point, at least not a redemptive one. What I did get out of it, though, was a sense of horror not only at what people go through but at what they put themselves through. Zone is closer to a documentary than a work of fiction (Énard's research included journalists, historians, and filmmakers) and I think that's how it should be approached. It's not holiday reading, that's for sure.
Review Copy
Original Review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I have to be resolute so I can gather momentum for the kilometers ahead of me then for the void and the terror of the world