James Joyce once wrote of “an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia”: a line steeped in Joycean contempt for the inattentive. In that sense, Mathias Énard’s Compass, though eminently accessible, is best suited to the sleepless reader inclined to follow associative thought to its furthest implications.
Franz Ritter, the insomniac musicologist whose drifting consciousness guides Compass, inhabits that state. His attention is both wandering and precise, a mode of phenomenal interpretation which, as Terry Eagleton put it, “refuses to be duped by the habitual experience of things, searching instead for the invisible mechanisms which gives birth to them”.
Although Compass surpasses its themes, it is structured around digression. Within these movements, Ritter begins to understand that the pursuit of love may require acts of abnegation. Schubert, Magris, Balzac, Beethoven, Proust, Mendelssohn: these are only the lighter cavalry. At one point Énard writes, “Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent.”
Without becoming moralistic, Compass is a political novel. It gently engages Said’s reading of Orientalism not merely as misrepresentation, but as domination, an aesthetic logic that masks the control of people and places. Énard, like Said, writes against systems of power. Unlike Foucault, he appears to believe that such structures might still be confronted through discourse.
In a world increasingly suspicious of intelligence, Compass, slowly and with great care translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a rare thing: a novel of intelligence that does not condescend, a book that invites absorption. In Barcelona, Robert Hughes quotes Josep Ferrater Mora: “The man with seny [an untranslatable term, meaning something like sense, perhaps also wisdom] renounces neither salvation nor experience, and is always trying to set up a fruitful integration between both opposed, warring extremes.” On the evidence of Compass, and of Zone and Street of Thieves, Énard is such a writer.
Im purposely keeping this Man Booker International Prize long listed book until late reading (doing the whole 13), knowing I want to finish on a high.
You have a piece of sublime writing awaiting you, Tony.
Have read Zone & Street of Thieves hence waiting
Not up there with ‘Zone’, but a very good book, nonetheless.
A matter of opinion; both are fascinating for their differences and similarities. I prefer Compass.
When I say I was not as passionate about Zone as others may be, reading it in no way put me off Enard. Your preference for Compass bodes well, but here the book is released in hardcover, so I will wait.
Street of Thieves is also very worthwhile.
I absolutely plan to read this. Does it matter if I haven’t read Said? Because I equally plan not to do so.
It doesn’t matter a jot. It would enrich your reading but it is perfectly entertaining without; in a way a primer to Said’s still valid argument about Orientalism.
By Allah! Another book I never heard of to be place on the bucket list for this Spring and Summer, before I vouage to Arabia oin ze Fall. Compas seems to be about some sort of bridge to the Moslem world. I look forward to reading this too, And now, I think I will drink some lemonade.
Compass is a marvel, so rare to read a contemporary, undoubted masterpiece.