Mathias Enard

On the shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International PrizeAs night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias nard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources--nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie--and binds them together in a most magical way.

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out – like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard’s most ambitious novel since Zone.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias nard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources--nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie--and binds them together in a most magical way.

In Tangier, young Lakhdar finds himself homeless after being caught in flagrante with his cousin Meryem. As the political and religious tensions in the Mediterranean flare up with the Arab Spring and the global financial crisis, Lakhdar and his friend Bassam entertain dreams of emigration, fuelled by a desire for freedom and a better life. Part political thriller, part road-movie, part romance, the latest novel by Mathias Enard takes us from the violence of Tangier's streets to Barcelona's louche Raval quarter. Street of Thieves is an intense coming-of-age story that delves deep into the brutal realities of the immigrant experience.

Skrevet på kanten af det arabiske forår, om en ung marokkaners vaklen mellem religiøs vækkelse og vestlig frihed. Mellem radikalisering og en kriminel løbebane. Den unge mand udstødes af sin familie og starter en mindre Odyssé i Nordafrika og Spanien. En fortælling om identitet og drømme i en moderne verden, hvor tradition og fremtidshåb kæmper med og mod hinanden. Han er ung, han er marokkaner, født og opvokset i Tanger, han er muslim til husbehov og tørster efter frihed og oplevelser i et samfund, der stort set ingen muligheder giver. I skolen har han lært et par spanske brokker og fransk nok til at proppe sig med noir-krimier. De sidste teenageår går med at fable om kusinen Meryems bryster. Det ender med, at han går i seng med hende - en enkelt gang, kun én, men de bliver taget på fersk gerning, han bliver gennembanket af sin far og smidt ud. Dér står han alene på gaden uden en øre på lommen, uden at ane, hvor han skal gå hen ...

Recipient of three French literary awards, Mathias Enard's follow-up to the critically acclaimed "Zone" is a timely novel about a young Moroccan boy caught up in the turbulent events of the Middle East, and a possible murder.Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.Lakhdar's transformations--from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner--take place against the backdrop of some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.If all that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend--one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes.A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, "Street of Thieves" solidifies Enard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in novelists of this century. This novel may even take "Zone"'s place in Christophe Claro's bold pronouncement that Enard's earlier work is "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he received several awards for "Zone"--also available from Open Letter--including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre.Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, and Maurice Blanchot, among others.

Francis Mirkovi?, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard’s Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.