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A review by bookly_reads
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard
5.0
`How many works of art will there have to be to put beauty in the world?` he thinks as he watches the guests get drunk.
I never thought I'd find another book like Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue, but this is it. Sudden Death's companion, curiously, takes place within the same century. In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, he discusses the seeming impossibility of writing a novel that lives up to the promise of its beginning.* George Saunders, in a recent interview, said, "I think most [writers] have the dream of writing the perfect story in which the reader just likes us from the beginning and stays with us. But I don’t think that’s really art." He said (and I don't even disagree with him) that books repel us and then draw us in again; that the golden beginning cannot be the whole of the thing.
But!! Then you get books so perfect that they read like single poems. Because poems, unlike books, can uphold that promise of every line being as good as the first. In Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, every line is golden and poetic, from its title to its closing sentence.
Of course, it refuses traditional chapter breaks and narration styles. Just as in Sudden Death (the books are really so similar!), the text jumps from being deep in the head of Michelangelo to assuming what might be the voice of the author, considering Michelangelo as a distant historical figure. The poet Misihi has his thoughts heard, and the thoughts of an unnamed dancer are directed at Michelangelo and spill out onto the page in second person.
Maybe, then, the book is beautiful because it is full of small beginnings. And yet it manages a much more straightforward narrative than Sudden Death (not that that is either good or bad) and overall felt like a novel. A treasured little gemstone of a novel.
*'The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night. . . . ." Every time I sit down here I read, "it was a dark and stormy night . . ." and the impersonality of the incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to that first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.' -Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
I never thought I'd find another book like Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue, but this is it. Sudden Death's companion, curiously, takes place within the same century. In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, he discusses the seeming impossibility of writing a novel that lives up to the promise of its beginning.* George Saunders, in a recent interview, said, "I think most [writers] have the dream of writing the perfect story in which the reader just likes us from the beginning and stays with us. But I don’t think that’s really art." He said (and I don't even disagree with him) that books repel us and then draw us in again; that the golden beginning cannot be the whole of the thing.
But!! Then you get books so perfect that they read like single poems. Because poems, unlike books, can uphold that promise of every line being as good as the first. In Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, every line is golden and poetic, from its title to its closing sentence.
Of course, it refuses traditional chapter breaks and narration styles. Just as in Sudden Death (the books are really so similar!), the text jumps from being deep in the head of Michelangelo to assuming what might be the voice of the author, considering Michelangelo as a distant historical figure. The poet Misihi has his thoughts heard, and the thoughts of an unnamed dancer are directed at Michelangelo and spill out onto the page in second person.
Maybe, then, the book is beautiful because it is full of small beginnings. And yet it manages a much more straightforward narrative than Sudden Death (not that that is either good or bad) and overall felt like a novel. A treasured little gemstone of a novel.
*'The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night. . . . ." Every time I sit down here I read, "it was a dark and stormy night . . ." and the impersonality of the incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to that first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.' -Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver