Fleeing a nameless war, a soldier emerges from the Mediterranean scrubland, filthy, exhausted and seeking refuge. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a scientific conference pays tribute to the late Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist whose commitment to his side of the Wall was unshaken by its collapse. The oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself – brings to light everything that is at stake in times of conflict: truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell and told in Mathias Enard’s typically mesmerizing, inventive prose, The Deserters lays bare the ravages of war on the most intimate aspects of life – and asks what remains of our selves in its wreckage.
‘A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past . feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass, a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey – Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero – endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of The Deserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.’
– Dustin Illingworth, New York Times
‘This rich, unsettling novel – the eighth by Mathias Énard, and his sixth to be translated into English (once again by Charlotte Mandell) – amounts to an interrogation of betrayal. In particular, it explores the complex decisions people are forced to make in the midst of war.. This is a moving, elegant and frequently uncomfortable novel about the emotional stakes of difficult choices made amid the most unbearable situations.’
– Russell Williams, Times Literary Supplement
‘Complex yet rewarding. The style is intense, almost overwhelming: at once hyper-detailed and deliberately generalized. We are in an unnamed time and an unnamed place, where everything is immediate and governed by the physical urge to survive.. Alternating with this stark account is one as dense and allusive as a Jorge Luis Borges story.’
– John Self, The Observer
‘[The Deserters] bears the hallmarks of Enard’s bric-a-brac erudition and his agility in crossing time periods, cultures and locations.. Mandell’s translation is harmonious throughout – it delights in precision without ever seeming fussy.. The Deserters is brimming with interesting ideas as it looks at today’s world with a long sightline back through 20th-century history.’
– Rónán Hession, Irish Times
‘An engrossing study of the struggle to recover one’s humanity in the aftermath of extreme violence. Told through interwoven narratives, the novel plays artfully with time and space, gently zeroing in on its central themes and spanning a wide range of human experience. The Deserters is immediately reminiscent of Coetzee: it is sparse, intelligent and hungry for the big moral questions.’
– Arianne Shahvisi, author of Arguing for a Better World
‘By turns rich in searing detail and sweeping in its intellectual range, The Deserters threads together Europe’s weighty past with a darker elemental future. Mathias Enard, always masterful, creates a fiercely compelling dual narrative, surprising, glitteringly alive and unforgettable.’
– Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
‘With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Enard builds a great work of art from “the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.” It’s a masterpiece.’
– Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Composed of two narrative strands twisting – but never crossing – around each other, The Deserters is unusual in the way it takes a certain American event – 9/11 – and places it within the context of other periods of historical rupture. The questions it raises are broad: Does history merely repeat itself, or can cycles be broken? Can we escape history, or are we forever at its mercy? By evoking 9/11 alongside the Yugoslav wars of the nineties and Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, Énard is able to explore the tensions of a seeming contradiction: that a certain era of world history – and this includes America’s place within it – is over. For good. And yet: how familiar this moment appears, the sound and shape of it. How closely it repeats syllables of the past.’
– Rhian Sasseen, The Baffler
‘A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.’
– Kirkus
‘I don’t know anybody who has quite [Enard’s] range.. Exquisitely written.’
– John Mitchinson, Monocle on Culture
‘Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works – ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional – are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfect balance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.’
– Javier Cercas, author of The Impostor
‘All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.’
– Joshua Cohen, New York Times
‘A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.’
– Christopher Beha, Harper’s
Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize for Compass.
Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Enard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She was recently named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
