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A review by arirang
Zone by Mathias Énard, Charlotte Mandell
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!