The fifty-three-year-old French novelist Mathias Énard is most distinguished by the many prizes he has won, more numerous as they are than his books. They have certified him the best within various spheres, ranging from French, French or German, Francophone, translated into English, and European. Going even bigger, his 2015 novel Compass, which the Guardian described as a “dreamlike study of Orientalism”, was on the Man Booker International Prize shortlist. New Directions is now publishing his 2023 novel, Déserter, as The Deserters, in a translation by Charlotte Mandel, who has already done four of his novels. This one, actually, has not won any prizes, not in the original language. In English, the novel is “interesting”, as one tends to say in a spirit of both curiosity and charity.
Énard has formed a braid of two stories: a deserter in an unnamed war somewhere near the Mediterranean runs into a donkey and a vulnerable woman; Irina, the daughter of the mathematician Paul Heudeber and his activist wife Maja, reviews their lives across the long twentieth century from an elderly distance. This contemporary war is seemingly added to the concentration camps, which Heudeber survived, and the 9/11 attacks, which coincide with his memorial, as a third critical moment in history. The deserter, bedraggled and nearly dead tired, starts out marching through the scrubland, and his story is slow and linear, whereas Irina’s moves around freely, and includes letters from Paul to his beloved Maja. Readers are treated to suspense in the first story as to what horrible things might happen next, and in the second as to what secrets might turn up from decades past. Énard is going for the kind of tonal contrast one sees in film, in which analogy the soldier’s doings are in nauseating hand-held camera footage under harsh, yellow light, and Irina’s memories are all grey and dignified, scored in quiet places with Schubert’s piano music. The present writer found the soldier’s tale, with its intrusive second person inserts of interior monologue, more appealing than Irina’s musings, but regardless, the setting off of the one by the other was at least noticeable, and indeed “interesting”.
The scenes are short, mostly, so the chapters are short. The sentences are long, but they use commas to splice so freely that it might be a mistake to think of them as sentences. Some of them are tone-deaf and nonsensical. Énard has a fairly prosaic plot point, that the soldier and the woman knew each other before, which once elaborated reaches us as this: “he searches his memory for her in a village street, on a square, they weren’t enemies, then just neighbors, and this nearness was mottled with jealousies, mistrust, scorn, before it was streaked with insults.” Énard has particular mental images he is getting down on the page, no doubt of that, but anyone who reads for such images with any care will refuse to accept that a “nearness” can be “mottled” or “streaked”. This and other such impossible metaphors may be due to problems with translation. Academic Irina is more careful with her abstractions and images, and her rather more mannered narration is relatively readable. Besides the letters, there is a lot of reported speech or summary of conversations, and Énard seems better off when he has these intermediaries, additional to the narrator, between himself and the reader. Characters can serve as editors in this odd way, declining to pass along certain unhappy locutions even as they act under the author’s control.
If this is not quite a novel of ideas it is a novel of characters with ideas. For the soldier, the insidious changes, of which he is aware, that the war has made to his instincts, wants, and maybe his very humanity; for Paul Heudeber, the ambition of building socialism and the abstractions of algebra, in which he sees something like poetry or escape; and for Irina, who wants to “pierce, understand, unveil, explain” Paul’s life, the way those are related to his experiences at Buchenwald, and his extraordinary loyalty to Maja, his uncompromised radical of a wife. The novel takes itself awfully seriously, or appears to, as far as one can see through this translation into its receded self-regard. The soldier and the woman are always threatening to turn into allegory or myth, most blatantly when she bathes in a stream, showing “her skin as white as milk”, and he watches in reverie. A little later he acts out his frustration, which we are to understand is also a higher rage, in a moment involving a trout that ought to stun but instead evokes Monty Python: “with an immense gesture, a gesture that is the whole universe, bellowing a harsh cry to the mountain, he smashes the fish’s head against the bark of a pine tree.” The Deserters has no humor, so one must try to enjoy this accident.
In one passage the trudging soldier encounters, in the middle of his path, “some equine shit”. This seems a curiously scientific phrase, until you think of what Mandel was trying to walk around. Once seen, this may be another happy accident, something found in translation, at least to the more pedestrian reader, familiar with coarse slang, with whom I have much sympathy. A mere philistine would call this novel “pretentious” and be done with it, but it should be allowed that Énard is sincere, and that one is reading the sum of years spent on thought, invention and arrangement. The novel knows what it’s about better than can I or anyone similarly unschooled in math or world affairs. Those drawn to grime and radical politics will be doubly enticed by the foot soldier’s arduous progress and the mathematician’s sense of history’s shape, and may be satisfied by the pattern in which they are intertwined. The Deserters is best left to the care of such readers.
FICTION
The Deserters
By Mathias Énard
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published May 20, 2025
thank goodness, a relief to hear you say all of this, I sure agree with you, what a painful reading experience to push through