I’ll not get past this passage today, from Mathias Enard’s Zone, translated so elegantly by Charlotte Mandell. Dreams of an endless train journey through old, weary places. If I read a better book than Zone this year I shall be fortunate.
” . . . and the employee (a blonde Venetian, a kind of barrette held in her mouth like a toothpick) had looked at me stunned, to Alexandria but there’s a train, and in that immediate confidence one has in professionals I had pictured, for a second, a train that would go from Venice to Alexandria in Egypt, direct via Trieste Zagreb Belgrade Thessalonica Istanbul Antioch Aleppo Beirut Acre and Port Said, a challenge to geopolitics and to the mind, and even, once I had understood her confusion, Alessandria in Piedmont, I had began to dream of a train that would unite all the Alexandrias, a network connecting Alessandria in Piedmont Alexandria Troas in Turkey Alexandria in Egypt Alexandria in Arachosia, possibly the most mysterious of them all, lost in Afghanistan far from railroads the train would be called The Alexander Express and would go from Alexandria Eschate in Tajikistan to Piedmont through the lips of Africa in thirteen days and as many nights . . .”
This vision of an imaginary train connecting all the world’s Alexandrias encapsulates what makes Enard’s novel so remarkable. In a work composed of one unbroken 517-page sentence, Enard transforms a seemingly straightforward journey, a train ride from Milan to Rome, into a sweeping meditation on the Mediterranean basin’s violent history. Through the fractured consciousness of Francis Mirković, a French-Croatian intelligence agent, we traverse not only physical geography but the more troubled terrain of European memory.
What captivates me about this particular passage is how it performs the novel’s central gesture: the collision of imagination with reality’s constraints. The Venetian employee’s casual mention of a train to Alexandria (meaning the Italian Alessandria) triggers in our narrator a phantasmagorical vision of impossible connectivity, a railway that would stitch together the fragmentary legacy of Alexander the Great across continents. This “Alexander Express” would not merely connect places; it would connect histories, civilizations, conquests.
Enard’s formal approach mirrors this content perfectly. The novel’s single, unbroken sentence creates a kind of railway of its own, one that continuously moves forward while simultaneously looping back through memory and history. The absence of full stops becomes more than a stylistic quirk; it embodies the novel’s philosophical stance that history is not neatly segmented but flows in a continuous, often violent stream. As Mirković’s train speeds through the night, his consciousness similarly speeds through the Zone’s bloody past, revealing how the Mediterranean’s seemingly discrete conflicts are in fact interconnected parts of a larger human tragedy.
The hallucinated “Alexander Express” thus becomes a powerful metaphor for literature itself, an imaginative technology that traverses boundaries and collapses distances, allowing us to see connections that political borders and historical ruptures typically obscure. Enard’s literary cartography redraws the map of the Mediterranean not as a collection of nation-states but as a single, troubled zone of historical memory, what he elsewhere calls “the cradle of wars.” And Charlotte Mandell’s translation accomplishes the remarkable feat of maintaining the hypnotic flow of the original French while rendering it in English that feels both natural and urgent.
As I read this passage, I find myself captivated not just by the image of this impossible train but by what it represents: the human imagination’s capacity to transcend geopolitical reality, if only momentarily. In a novel preoccupied with borders, violence, and fractured identities, this dreamed railway offers a fleeting but powerful alternative, not an erasure of difference but a recognition of profound historical interconnection. This tension between division and connection, between borders imposed and borders transgressed, runs throughout Zone, making it a work of remarkable contemporary resonance despite its historical scope.
I will be interested to hear how you like the book at the end. I’m a bit of an outlier on this one, I don’t have the same love others do. I didn’t hate it, but I found it an arduous read through the mid-section. I note that I did underline a large section of the passage you just quoted though.
I’m barely started but enchanted at the moment.
It’s not without its merits.
Two comments – I read an interview with Charlotte Mandel that she does not read a book before translating it, she translates as she goes, and that Enard’s prose made this harder than usual. As I can imagine. Also, I met Enard last year when he gave a lecture/discussion at the Michalski Foundation near here. It was one of those fantastic sessions – between him and an academic from the University in Lausanne, who knew his work nearly by heart, all of it – where two highly intelligent people have a marvelous discussion about everything and nothing to do with the books in question. He struck me as vivid and thoughtful and a little odd, which I always like.
So fascinated by the idea that a translator has not read a text beforehand. What would be gained by that, do you think?
“vivid and thoughtful and a little odd”: that surely encompasses all my favourite people in the world, writers or otherwise.
Her point is an interesting one – she absorbs the text as she goes, engages with it as a reader as much as a translator. I think this would be a lot of fun and I’m sure it retains a freshness for her as she works with it. And I liked overall what she had to say. A small part of me, however, remembered that this is the privilege of a translator who can pick and choose projects offered to her, which is rare indeed and many couldn’t attempt this on a professional level, even for the aesthetic exercise it offered, because it is more often the translator hunting for a publisher than vice versa.
Thanks, Michelle, for that perspective. It made me wonder whether Fog Island Mountain is published in Japan, and, if so, whether you made the translation?
I rather liked this (in fact I think I may have made it my book of the year that year, though I can’t now recall). It helped I read some of it on a train. Like many fat novels, like War and Peace which I’m reading presently, you sort of have to abandon yourself to it and let yourself be carried by its own rhythms and logic.
Mandel’s approach would I think have been trickier than usual here, I can see that.
It’s structurally very clever, which I rather like. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on the short story collection the narrator reads within the novel. Views on that (and its significance) vary widely.
Oh, that sounds very intriguing. It’s hard to pull off the story within the story. I’ll certainly let you know what a I make of it.
I certainly missed that, but probably as I haven’t previously heard of La Modification by Butor. Is it available in English?
Googled it. I see what you mean.
i liked it too. i wonder what the new one is like.
I wonder too. I’ve got Street of Thieves to read at some point.
Yes, I get that impression from what I’ve seen of Enard on YouTube.
I don’t know that book, though it also looks interesting. Sadly not widely available in translation.
Thanks, Anthony – no, Fog Island Mountains hasn’t been sold into any other languages. I’d love to see it in French, (and French publishing is more interested in Japan-set fiction than some other countries) but it’s pretty unlikely it will ever get translated into Japanese. I can dream : )
Also meant to ask you if this is the first Enard that you’ve read?
Yes, my first Enard, but I’m looking forward to reading the others that are or will be available.