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A review by harimau_belang
Zone by Mathias Énard
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.