At 45, the French novelist Mathias Énard, though not well known outside his native country and hardly famous there, is about as garlanded as any writer ever becomes: a professor at Barcelona University, an officer of the Ordre des Arts and des Lettres, the recipient of various residencies and fellowships, he is also the winner of all manner of prix, several of them for Zone, his 530-page, single-sentence tour of European atrocity. (His able translator Charlotte Mandell has an unenviable task.) It seems that Énard has been extended the courtesy denied to almost every writer – including many of his fellow countrymen – of being applauded for taking risks and granted acceptance for books that are, by any definition, intransigently difficult to read.
Énard’s latest novel is doubly challenging. In addition to being gloomy, dense and, though more or less conventionally punctuated, light on paragraph breaks, Compass refuses the reader various basic co-ordinates, erecting a barrier to comprehension that touches almost every line. (It still won the Prix Goncourt and on 15 March was named in the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize.)
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