Compass
Mathias Enard, Trans. by Charlotte Mandell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Compass
Mathias Enard, Trans. by Charlotte Mandell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
...the beauty of Compass is the sheer breadth and density of its vision, calling forth a multitude of different worlds, bound only by the capacious mind of its narrator.
With divisive rhetoric spouting these days from every direction, Mathias Énard’s magnificent Compass has appeared on our shores at precisely the right time.
Compass, a brilliant, elusive, outré love letter to Middle Eastern art and culture, is also a spirited challenge to Said’s masterpiece, which can be felt thrumming beneath the text as an animating anxiety.
Mr. Enard fuses recollection and scholarly digression into a swirling, hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration.
...[a] masterly new novel that attempts to redeem the specter of the Orient.
As a literary genre, the stream-of-consciousness epic is by now rather old and conservative, even though new versions are regularly hailed as daringly experimental. Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static political and cultural essay – at least until the final few pages, when, miraculously, real-time events intrude upon Franz’s reverie, and the book concludes with a surprisingly upbeat, if not sentimental, flourish. As the dawn does for our sleepless hero, this comes as a relief to the reader, who emerges from this strangely powerful work as from a feverish dream..
...one conceit of the novel is that Ritter is writing (or imagining he might write) a work of scholarship (or a satire of a work of scholarship) to be called 'On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient' which is (at least in part) the novel we are reading, or it would have been if Ritter had written any of it down. This element of the book is, to be perfectly honest, irritating and a little bit dumb. It doesn’t work as a conceit or as a structural device.
Énard is himself a translator of Persian and Arabic who has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, and he writes with an obvious love of the region, a deep knowledge of its history, and a great despair over what has become of it during the past decade.
[Enard] occasionally overstuffs Compass with the kind of Orientalist arcana that might be better suited to a scholarly essay. However, when he concentrates on storytelling, as he does in the novel’s second half, there are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition..
...astonishing [and] encyclopedic.
Lyrical and intellectually rich without ever being ponderous, reminiscent at turns of Mann’s Death in Venice and Bowles’ Sheltering Sky..