Déserter

by Mathias Énard

Quelque part dans un paysage méditerranéen orageux familier et insaisissable, en marge d'un champ de bataille indéterminé, un soldat inconnu tente de fuir sa propre violence. Le 11 septembre 2001, sur la Havel, aux alentours de Berlin, à bord d'un petit paquebot de croisière, un colloque scientifique fait revivre la figure de Paul Heudeber, mathématicien est-allemand de génie, disparu tragiquement, resté fidèle à son côté du Mur de Berlin, malgré l'effondrement des idéologies.
La guerre, la désertion, l'amour et l'engagement... le nouveau roman de Mathias Enard - vif, bref, suspendu - observe ce que la guerre fait au plus intime de nos vies.

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical, 21st Century

256 pages

First published August 23, 2023

About the author

Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée-de-La-Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.

Compass, which garnered Énard the renowned Prix Goncourt in 2015, traces the intimate connection between Western humanities and art history, and Islamic philosophy and culture. In one sentence that's over 500 pages long, Zone tells of the recent European past as a cascade of consequences of wars and conflicts.

Énard lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the Universitat Autònoma. His latest publications include a poetry collection titled Dernière communication à la société proustienne de Barcelone (Final message to the Proust Society of Barcelona) and Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, a long novel published in 2020.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drawing parallels… The present and the past…
Prisoners of the camps… Fugitives… Exiles… Deserters…

you stink of blood and shit,
you stink of sleep and hunger,
a child could kill you with one punch,
he counts the days since he left the city. Since his flight from the barracks. Four days since he launched the vehicle into the ravine…

The world was cracked into two parts… So many years have passed but there are still those singed by the war… The daughter of the imprisoned during the wartime mathematician, who is now dead, and her very old mother…

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Both the deserter and the mathematician’s daughter face disasters…

…bodies falling from the windows, towers collapsing, crowds running to escape the impenetrable clouds of dust as if emerging from the gates of hell.

Even in peacetime wars don’t leave us in peace.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mathias Enard just fucking rules. His latest book is an unusual novel, made up of two novellas wrapped around eachother, though they never intersect.

There is the tale of a deserter from a brutal unnamed war, stalking the mountains, surviving and aiming for the border. This is interspersed with the life story of the fictional German mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, and his political activist wife Maja, as told by their daughter, Irina.

Irina is looking back from the present day to September 11th, 2001, a day when a memorial for her father on board a boat in Berlin is interrupted by the event that would shape early 20th century discourse.

The two narratives don't come together at all, so we can only assume that's how Enard means it to be. So what are we to take from these stories? To me, it seems to be about the cycles of war, the cycles of human stupidity and the relentless toll it takes on humanity. But it is also a story of survival and relentless adaptation.

Whatever it is, the prose is delicious and lyrical, with so many passages filled with wisdom and wonder and horror. He's a stone cold genius.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

2025 Cercador Prize finalist

Paul defined himself as “an anti-fascist mathematician”. He was as stubborn as an axiom.

The Deserters, translated by Charlotte Mandell (after a one-book Frank Wynne cover period) from Mathias Énard's original is a collection of two novellas.

The English blurb (taken from the French original) refers to the "oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself."

Which is a polite way of saying that the author has written two separate novellas, but rather than publishing them separately has chosen to do so in one volume, and furthermore printed them in interspersed sections. The connection between the two, or indeed the logic of the interspersing, was a mystery to me and I've not really seen an explanation from the author.

The original novella, centered around the figure of Paul Heudeber, a fictional mathematician who survived Buchenwald only to die of drowing (possibly a suicide, possibly an accident) in his mid 70s, manages in its brief length to cover key events in a, very Western centric it must be said, version of the history of the last hundred years, including the Holocaust, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11, Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

From interviews, the invasion of Ukraine seems to have been what prompted the 2nd novella, the story of a man who deserts from a vicious war, and returns to his home area, and a woman, also fleeing the war, he encounters. Although in contrast to the relative historical precision of the first, Enard has chosen a placeless and timeless setting for this part, perhaps an attempt to acknowledge the specificity of the original novella and, by contrast, the more universal experience of war.

The story of Heudeber is well-crafted, Enard carefully inserting him into mathematical history so that, for example, he's a protege of the real-life Emmy Noether.

Heudeber is known for a work he wrote during his internment in Buchenwald, which, after his death is being discussed at a conference in his honour starting on 9th September 2011 and schedule to run on to and past the 11th (cue ominous sounding music):

Paul defended his thesis and obtained his first post at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin just when intellectuals were starting to flee the GDR. The work entitled Ettersberg Conjectures, Mathematical Elegies, was one of the first books published by the Academy's press at the end of 1947. It was comprised of studies Paul Heudeber wrote during his captivity in Buchenwald between 1940 and 1946. Venerated today as a treasure by scientific and literary communities, the Conjectures was reprinted only once in East Germany, in 1973 (in a purely mathematical version, without the poems, the corollaries, the commentaries on camp life) and it wasn't until 1991 that the Akademie Verlag reprinted the original version, augmented by Paul with fragments he himself had left out of the first publication (mainly love poems to Maja written between 1937 and 1947). It's this version, under the title Buchenwald Conjectures, translated into English by Robert Kant in Cambridge, that became known all over the world, the only maths book to have known relative success, so much so that the publishers, who thought this success could be even greater, suggested to Paul that he authorize an exclusively 'literary' version, without the mathematical expositions, which he of course refused until his death.
...
Robert Kant's contribution to the 2001 conference (a contribution he was revising with us during the river journey through Berlin) had to do with the first conjecture, on the circumstances of the birth of this extraordinary project, in the heart of the extreme violence of the concentration camp, and on the way Paul Heudeber launched this imaginary dialogue, from his barracks, with the mathematicians of previous generations: the first conjecture (hence the first chapter) deals with the theorems of David Hilbert; the second is devoted to Paul's famous demonstration of the twin prime conjecture, and so on.

Robert Kant argued that the originality of Paul's text - apart from its inarguably literary quality, its considerations on the Revolution, its obscure passages, its dark poetry - stems from its scientific radicality: from the intersection, in the heart of the twentieth century, of historical despair with mathematical hope.

As per the quote, Énard allows Heudeber to have solved the (still to this day unsolved) Twin Prime Conjecture - Yitang Zhang managing, impressively, to establish only in 2013 the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often, but at 70 million not 2, and various efforts thereafter, including the Polymath Project reducing this to <=246.

At one point we are told that Heudeber’s poems and prose writings in Buchenwald were constrained by the volume of paper available to him, which makes it somewhat unlikely he would have succeeded in setting out a complex and lengthy mathematical proof, one that ultimately required computational techniques. At the risk of suggesting the author should have written a different novel, I can’t help but wonder if an alternative set up might have been that he claimed to have discovered the proof within the camp, and spent the rest of his career trying to reconstruct it.

For the second novella, I think one's reaction to this will depend on one's taste for the prose style. I think as a stand-alone book I'd have relished it, but as interruptions to a tale of pure mathematics, I was less welcoming. This a hail-storm:

She reaches the trunk and leans against it, despite the storm the donkey eats the tough little green leaves on the lowest branches, she's afraid, the clouds are of a limitless black, she is dripping, her scarf, her short hair, her face are covered in tiny rivulets, the water is streaming down her shoulders, slipping between her breasts; her socks are swimming in the muddy torrents that span the tree roots and form miniature rapids, and when the storm is at its height, she thinks, as the darkened horizon is twisted with lightning flashes punctuated by rumblings, the madness of the rain seems to interrupt itself only to return twice as strong; it becomes thick, white, hard, and rebounds against the rocks, a stinging swarm of thousands of insects, the lower part of her legs, between her ankles and the hem of her skirt, is attacked by white hailstones that bounce back wherever they can, adding to the sonorous panic, to the infernal noise of the thunder, it's an army of millions of ice soldiers furiously stomping on the slopes, suddenly the air is freezing, as if smoking with frost - the donkey has started braying again, it's complaining about the hail, it's complaining about this painful mass on its back, it too is seeking the cover of the tree, whose dark branches, thin at the ends, are themselves victims of the hailstones and produce the muffled sound of a semantron struck by hordes of mallets, ice marbles andpiling up against the rocks, in the crevices, on the slightest ledge, and are painting the landscape in a heavy, bluish, transluscent snow which reflects the lightning and produces a morbid light, a sickly, fantastical, phosphoresence.

For me, 4 stars for the Heudeber story, 3 for the deserter section, so 3.5 overall which I'm rounding down as I think I'd have appreciated each more as a stand-alone work.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love Énard’s writing, the way he crafts a sentence, the way he weaves those sentences around one another, at once erudite and cinematic, all of it excites me very much.

Here we have two narratives that run parallel throughout the whole book but never intertwine, never coalesce in any obvious way. In one, a soldier deserts an unnamed war and treks across the mountains to his childhood cabin. In the other, the daughter of a once well known German mathematician, a man who survived his internment in Buchenwald by escaping into the world of numbers and who remained loyal to the GDR and the fight for communism until the fall of the Wall, reflects on her father’s life and legacy and the secrets and shadows that haunted her parents' relationship and that remained hidden to her until the end.

Mathias has shared that the fictional biography of the mathematician was the original focus for the novel, but that the start of the war in Ukraine and the resurgence of Russia’s quest for imperial power inspired the addition of the soldier’s story.

One can speculate about how one narrative relates to the other—is the through line hope? The mathematician finds hope in the concentration camp through numbers and his cause, the deserter finds hope in the humanity that slowly comes back to him after the horrors he has committed in the war. Is the common theme the futility of war, the danger of blind loyalty to a cause? The unnamed war the man deserts needs no name because it can be so many. The mathematician is haunted for life by his time in the concentration camp but his loyalty to his own beliefs and cause creates an isolated existence in which he is rarely able to be with his wife and daughter.

Énard’s sentences are poetic and such a joy to read that the absence of easy answers or a clear connection do not matter in the slightest, the thrill is in the beauty of his words.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

Mathias Énard always picks fascinating subjects and does something original with them. Here it is war, loyalty, betrayal and their reverberations in time.

The novel consists of two, very distinct narratives told in alternating chapters. First, there is a deserting soldier escaping an unnamed war in an unnamed Mediterranean country. He is alone in the wilderness, exposed to the elements (and here the nature writing is really good), trying to survive and not get caught. Then he encounters a woman with a donkey, equally on the run but from the other side.

Second, we have the very different story of the commemoration of a brilliant East-German mathematician Paul Heudeber, on a boat outside Berlin on 10 September 2001. A convinced communist and concentration camp survivor, Paul has stayed true to his ideals, staying behind in the GDR. But there are question marks surrounding his death and his relationship with a West-German politician.

Sometimes Énard wants to show off his erudition a bit too much. With the two very different narratives he can demonstrate a love for nature as well as for the most abstract of sciences.

His keenest interest is history though and I believe that is the lens through which we are supposed to read this novel. History repeating itself, the ever presence of war and conflicting ideals leading to violence. Although there are clear common themes and parallels can be drawn between the two strands, I am in need of more analysis to understand the overall logic of bringing them together in one novel.

4 for the writing, 3 for the concept.

[〽️onicae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anche il cielo piange sangue (cit. lamento funebre iraniano)

Si può subire il fascino di una parola? A me è successo con il verbo disertare, derivante dal latino desertare (abbandonare), che dà il titolo all'opera di Énard.
Se mi avessero chiesto, prima della lettura di questo libro, quale immagine mi evocasse il verbo disertare, mi sarei limitata a rispondere: quella di un soldato in fuga dal campo di battaglia.
E se inoltre mi avessero chiesto di pensare a un significato più ampio del verbo, tutt'al più avrei risposto che diserta chi abdica ai propri doveri sociali o morali.
Ecco, ho scoperto che per Énard questo è solo il punto di partenza e che la parola in questione può assumere una valenza più ampia e anche più profonda.
La riflessione che ho fatto, leggendo i due racconti che costituiscono l'opera, è che, a volte, ad essere tradita, abbandonata, lasciata indietro è una parte di noi. Altre volte si tratta di una promessa che ci eravamo fatti e che non abbiamo coltivato. E credo sia anche in questa accezione che Énard ci parla di diserzione.

Le due storie che costituiscono l'opera sono come rette parellele. Diversi i protagonisti, diversa la cornice. Diverso anche lo stile adottato dall'autore (più poetico nella prima, almeno secondo il mio sentire, più complesso e articolato nella seconda).
Énard le racconta a capitoli alternati, forse per consentire al lettore di percepire una certa assonanza o quantomeno il richiamo dei temi che hanno in comune: la guerra, la solitudine, la disperazione.

Il primo racconto è quello che ho amato di più. E' la storia di un milite ignoto, in fuga da una guerra non meglio definita, con addosso un carico di brutture, inflitte e subite.
All'inizio del racconto, come detto, mi ero fatta l'idea che la diserzione dovesse essere intesa come abdicazione ai doveri di soldato.
Eppure, proseguendo nella lettura, mi è venuto da pensare che invero il soldato, con l'inizio della guerra, abbia disertato a se stesso e al proprio sentire. Solo nel momento in cui si allontanerà dal campo di battaglia e si rifugerà tra i monti, nella baita in cui è cresciuto, il protagonista si riapproprierà gradualmente della propria umanità.
E' proprio a quell'umanità e quella capacità di sentire che aveva abdicato.
Ci sono altri protagonisti in questa storia ma non voglio svelare nulla se non che uno è ritratto in controluce sulla prima di copertina. E' l'unico protagonista dei due racconti che non diserterà, comunque vogliate intendere la parola.

La seconda storia è quella di un geniale matematico, sopravvissuto al campo di concentramento di Buchenwald, sostenitore della Ddr, dove sceglierà di vivere. La sua è una storia d'amore per i numeri e la scienza, per la compagna e la figlia e, non da ultimo, per i propri convincimenti, per le proprie difficili scelte.
Anche in questo racconto ci sono diversi protagonisti e quasi tutti in qualche modo tradiranno qualcosa o qualcuno.

E a proposito di tradimenti, segnalo che il racconto del matematico racchiude in poche pagine anche la storia di un grande scienziato persiano del secolo XIII, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Racconta Énard, esperto di storia e lingua araba e persiana, che fu proprio al-Tusi ad accompagnare i mongoli fino a Baghdad. Scrive Énard:

Baghdad della Casa della Sapienza e delle biblioteche, Baghdad delle Mille e una notte, Baghdad del pensiero, della poesia, del sapere, Baghdad che era stata il faro del mondo per cinquecento anni e fu perduta, distrutta dai mongoli di Hulagu all'inizio di febbraio del 1258.

Chi lo leggerà troverà, tra il narrato e il non detto, tanti collegamenti con la storia più recente, dal 2001 ad oggi.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel consist of two seemingly unrelated, alternating stories. One is about a deserter in an unidentified war, presumably somewhere in the Mediterranean, and his attempt to escape the country. Another is about Irina Heudeber and her family, her father Paul (mathematician, survivor of Buchenwald, devout East German communist) and her mother, who became a West German politician. There is much focus on memory and the interrelation of past and present, favorite themes of Énard. I found the story of the literal deserter and his war somewhat tedious, although it is an effective portrayal of the dehumanizing effects of war. The story of the Heudebers was more interesting, to me at least. To explain the plural of the title would give away too much. The writing, even in translation, is superb.

[Chik67 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro "particolare" nel formato.
Due storie intrecciate tra loro: la biografia del matematico immaginario Paul Heudeber, prima prigioniero del campo di Buchenwald e poi convinto comunista nella Germania dell'Est e quella di un anonimo soldato, disertore di una guerra non specificata, in un paese del Mediterraneo che viene facile identificare con il Sud dei Balcani.

La prima storia è raccontata in maniera spezzettata e indiretta, tramite lettere di Heudeber, tramite i racconti di lui che ne fanno la compagna di una vita Maja (ma compagna a distanza, in quanto esponente politica della Germania Ovest), i colleghi Thiele, Pawley, Kant, Baza. Sejdic, e la figlia Irina.

La seconda storia è raccontata in uno stile lirico, che passa senza soluzione di continuità tra un discorso indiretto, la prima persona del protagonista e quella della donna che incontra, nel suo rifugio nel bosco, e con cui intreccia un complicato rapporto di reciproca paura.

Le due storie non si incontrano mai e spetta a noi capire perché questo libro sia un unico libro. Legati dal tema del disertare, è spontaneo pensare: è questa la congettura che Enard ci lascia da risolvere (così come Heudeber, famoso, appunto, per un testo contenente più congetture che dimostrazioni).

Disertare è anche abbandonare e tradire. Questo libro, in effetti, è colmo di abbandoni e di tradimenti (che non svelo per evitare spoiler). Anche il ruolo della matematica, legata costantemente nel testo alla poesia, credo io, ha molto a che fare con il disertare. E' disertare la complessità del mondo il rifugiarsi nella matematica o nella poesia, ma la diserzione è spesso l'unico modo non violento per sfuggire al dolore, alla cattiveria della storia, alla lotta per il potere. Ma i disertori sono sempre in fuga, vengono costantemente riacciuffati, dalla grande Storia (l'11 Settembre) o da un incontro casuale. Disertare non è, sembra dirci l'autore, mai una strategia vincente, anche se a volte è l'unica strategia possibile.

E' un libro che lascia molti spunti su cui meditare, pur non essendo in alcun modo un libro a tema. Ma è un libro, per me, complessivamente irrisolto. Diversamente da tanti non ho amato la scrittura "poetica" dei capitoli del disertore, né la struttura del libro. Mi è sembrato un lavoro in cui a un certo punto l'autore si sia accontentato della vaghezza, invece di costruire qualcosa di più incisivo, profondo, non dico chiaro ma certo in cui alcuni spunti fossero esplicitati in maniera più nitida.

Per il mio giudizio un libro da tre stelle. La quarta se la merita per il modo estremamente raffinato in cui ha trattato la mia disciplina, costruendo personaggi e scenari abbastanza plausibili (chissà se le "congetture di Buchenwald" sono ispirate alla "Topologia Algebrica in prigionia" di Leray?). Anche la figura di Emmy Noether ne esce, per quanto secondaria, abbastanza limpida (anche se al lettore non informato non sarà chiaro che si tratta di una persona reale e non immaginaria).

Secondo me un'opera minore di un grande autore. Ma potrei anche essere troppo stupido io per averci capito qualche cosa.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shadows are overtaking everything, the lower part of the walls are already in darkness,

I'll curl up in the dark until I disappear, and when daylight comes they ll already be gone,

she knows that's not what will happen,

there is no star in the sky and she senses that these voices that are combining are combining against her, that no one is on her side, that her side does not exist, if she wasn't wounded she could have tried to flee, descend the long steep path with the taste of abyss and sweat,

my heart, it is echoing its machine-gun beat through the whole mountain my mouth is dry, I'm cold, ever since the beginning of the war I've been cold, months and months of cold, I'll leave for the north to escape the freezing cold of the sea, of the city, of the country, the women who were with me that day didn't want to leave, they paid, they said, they paid with their bodies and their shame they paid they can stay, stay shorn, stay raped, stay soiled, stay in the stable, in the intense cold of the stable, the absolute cold of war that will last for years to come, at night, in everyone's sleep, torturers and tortured,
[207]

[Matatoune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mathias Enard écrivait une biographie romancée sur un mathématicien fictif lorsque la guerre en Ukraine éclate. Déserter naît de cette situation, un choc qui vient conclure un siècle, le précédent, fait d'utopies ratées, de rêves fous toujours présents mais complètement détachés de la réalité maintenant vécue.

Maïa Scharnhorst est une femme politique de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest, toujours soupçonnée d'intelligence avec l'ennemi, celui de la RDA. Elle est morte en 2005 à 87 ans. Paul Heudeber est celui qui l'a tant aimée, même de l'autre côté du mur, à Berlin. Mathématicien renommé, il est communiste fervent et encarté depuis 1967 et antifasciste notoire. L'année 2021 avec son confinement et sa guerre proche pousse leur fille à raconter.

Irène a gardé le goût de l'histoire notamment lorsque son père racontait l'exposition universelle. Et, comme il était ce mathématicien apprécié, elle est devenue spécialiste de l'histoire des mathématiques. À partir de lettres, de poèmes, de films, elle retrace la vie de ce père énigmatique qui, communiste convaincu, a fui ses croyances politiques devant les réalités. Mais surtout, Paul est l'archétype de l'homme du XXeme siècle. Il a traversé Buchenwald qu'il s'interdisait de nommer ainsi, avant il y eut le camp de Gurs rassemblant entre autres “les indésirables ” fuyant les nazis.

Alors, naturellement, elle raconte l'hommage pour son père auquel sa mère a assisté. Lors de la conférence croisière organisée en 2001, les intervenants ont célébré l'institut de mathématiques qu'il avait créé en 1961. Seulement, nous sommes en septembre…

Le roman de Mathias Enard évolue parallèlement avec deux histoires : le soldat déserteur avec cette femme aux cheveux ras, et cette fille Irène qui part à la redécouverte de ses deux parents.

À aucun moment, les deux histoires ne se rencontrent. Leur point commun est la fuite. Celle du groupe de référence pour tenter d'oublier les morts, leurs regards interrogateurs qui reviennent, tant, la nuit. Mais aussi, la fuite de nos espoirs, idéaux qui ont enchanté notre présent, dont la croyance s'est effacée au fur et à mesure que des charniers se sont dévoilés mais aussi devant l'amour devenu mirage.

Jusqu'à la destruction du Mur, l'idéal socialisme de Paul, comme Mathias Enard le démontre, pouvait faire écran à la réalité. À partir des guerres de Yougoslavie, puis du fameux 11 septembre, la foi d'un monde diffèrent s'est effritée et les illusions se sont envolées, ne laissant que l'imaginaire pansait les esprits. Cette désertion décrite par Mathias Enard est à l'image du soldat déserteur, un lieu de solitude intense où le membre influent devient paria et où il ne reste que l'imaginaire pour se raccrocher à nos rêves et suivre notre humanité.

Le récit de ce soldat, tentant d'échapper aux cauchemars des exactions qu'il a organisés, retrouve grâce aux lieux de l'enfance sa propre compassion.

Mathias Enard écrit avec limpidité même si ses histoires révèlent des degrés de compréhension imbriqués. Mélangeant la langue de la narration à celle du tutoiement puis celle de la mémoire, Déserter étonne par la justesse de son propos, l'érudition dont il s'entoure et la poésie humaniste qu'il transmet.
Difficile de ne pas le découvrir !

Chronique illustrée ici
https://vagabondageautourdesoi.com/20...

[Otto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich habe mir lange Zeit schwer getan mit diesem, mir von meiner Buchhändlerin empfohlenen, Roman. Immer wieder versuchte ich die zwei unzusammenhängenden Erzählstränge des Buches zusammen zu bringen, was aber scheinbar nicht möglich ist, vielleicht auf einer mir sich nicht erschliessenden Metaebene
Sei’s drum, die Geschichte des Deserteurs, der versucht sich mit seiner Gefangenen? Geisel? durchzuschlagen, verletzt zuletzt, der versucht seine Schuld an der Teilnahme an einem Gemetzel (und die Frau in seiner „Gewalt“ war eines der Opfer) zu bewältigen ist höchst spannend beschrieben.
Und auch die Geschichte um den Mathematiker Heuberger hat ihren Reiz.

[Theo Coleridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally compelling but never blew me away in any way really. I kept waiting for the soldier/woman plot to get interesting, or specific, but as an author obsessed with historical reference I think this anonymity is a bit limiting for Enard

[Gabriel Cheers-Aslanian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t sum up this book in a way that’s any different from the blurb. It’s about everything that can happen in love and war. I definitely need to shorten my reviews but I think I should probably explain it a little incase people want to read it.

This book has two thematically connected storylines - although I kinda have an inkling that they’re directly connected to each other through one of the characters - that flit between each other.

The first is about a soldier who has deserted from the Balkan wars and is trying to find his way to the border. He happens across a woman of a different ethnic group from his community, who is also fleeing and her donkey. This plotline is mainly about their individual relationships to each other and their experiences of the war and their escape from it.

The other plotline is from the perspective of a woman called Irina Scharnhorst, who is ruminating on the relationship of her father, Paul Heudeber who was a (fictional) titanic 20th century Mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, ardent communist and a resident of East Germany, and her mother Maya Scharnhorst, a leading politician in west Germany. Mainly it’s about her dad. This takes place c. 2022-23 but also in 2001, on a river boat during a memorial conference for her father, that coincided with 9/11.

Enard’s prose is really good, it has a really great feel and it’s easy to read. The way he describes the senses and memory (within the deserter storyline in particular) really brought me into the book. Sometimes he used the first person in a way that his writing was like stage commands for me to think as the character in that moment, if that makes any sense. Also I really liked the pacing, although I wish there was a little bit more of the deserter storyline. The way Enard portrayed the donkey was very sweet and really perked the book up at times.

I’d give this a 4.5. It’s a brilliant and sad book.

Thankyou Bibi for the advanced review copy 🫢🙌

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful.

[incipit mania]

Incipit
Ha posato l’arma e fatica a togliersi gli scarponi che con il loro odore (escrementi, sudore rancido) fanno più pesante la stanchezza.
Continua su IncipitMania

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Déserter, une idéologie, une guerre?

[Cathérine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 *

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was, to be honest, a little disappointed with this. That's less a point about the book, than about my expectations of anything by Mathias Enard. Énard is my favourite author at the moment, one of my favourite modern authors full stop, and one of my favourite authors of all time. Books like Zone and Compass are masterpieces in my view.

In some ways this book covers familiar grounds. There are various Academics and there is a story of violent conflict, themes that reoccur in many Enard's stories. In this book they are separate as the book is made up of two separate stories, that are interwoven through the book. The stories do not actually interact at all, there is no overlap, it is merely the way the book is structured. I think there is meant to be some point about the whole concept of being a Deserter, but I'm afraid it largely escaped me.

As always from Enard the prose is excellent. Descriptive, imaginative, unusual - original, and it is not obvious that this was a translation (so hats off to the translator). It also had for me that power that Enard's writing has of pulling me in and keeping me going. But in the end I found it all a bit perplexing and unsatisfying. Enard's writing can be perplexing - but in his other books I enjoyed them even though there was some oblique and opaque sections. But the same in this book merely annoyed.

I suppose everyone has a bit of a dud now and again, ("dud" is a massive over statement, but reflects my disappointment). If this was the first book of his I read I would probably have never read him again, and missed out on some of his gems. Given the way he writes, this is very much a personal feeling, and others may well feel completely different about it.

Four stars for the writing, three for the plot and storyline and ending. Averaged out at 3.5 - I'm tempted to round down, but I've rounded up to 4 for the totally illogical reason that I like his other stuff so much.

[Ana Jorge · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Matthias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Les mathématiques sont un voile posé sur le monde, qui épouse les formes du monde, pour l’envelopper entièrement ; c’est un langage et c’est une matière, des mots sur une main, des lèvres sur une épaule ; la mathématique s’arrache d’un geste vif : on peut y voir alors la réalité de l’univers, on peut la caresser comme le plâtre des moulages, avec ses aspérités, ses monticules, ses lignes, qu’elles soient de fuite ou de vie.

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of The Deserters’ allure is its language—in a virtuosic translation by Charlotte Mandell—but equally compelling is the challenge the novel presents; one can’t help oneself from trying to decipher the relationship between the two plotlines, wondering what revelation from one story shines light on the other. As each plays out in parallel, these narratives confront the reader with the vastness of human experience—but reading farther is to watch this complexity give way to profound, eternal simplicity. A chance encounter. A conjecture proven correct. However disparate their circumstances, all of Énard’s characters face the natural world, the nature of war, the fact of suffering. // Full review in Asymptote's May Translation Round-Up: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...

[caro · Rating 5 out of 5]

que hermoso libro

como siempre, batallo en explicar porque me gusta un libro. cuando le conte a mi mama que se trataba de dos historias que no se relacionaban me dijo que seguro antes de terminarlo entenderia la relacion, pero la verdad es que aun no la entiendo. me gusta mucho porque las historias por si mismas no captarian mi atencion (creo), pero al entrelazarlas me parecian como hermanas y tambien opuestas y hacian creecer mi interes en ambas. malamente no tengo mucho conocimiento geopolitico, y realmente nunca habia visto a 9/11 como el quebre de la paz que nos habiamos prometido despues de la segunda guerra mundial. para mi, hablar de guerra ahora es muy diferente que hablar de guerra antes, cuando creia que ese tipo de cosas no podian pasar en un mundo globalizado y con cobertura mediatica, y solo sabia lo que, en monterrey agringado, me decian en clase de "social studies". sabia de desigualdades y conflictos internos, pero la guerra parecia estar en otras ligas, en genocidio ni se diga. desde hace tiempo es evidente que realmente nunca ha habido paz, y la guerra perciste, aun con camaras que graban el exterminio. la historia de Irene me parecio muy impactante, por eso y muchas mas cosas. supongo que de cierta manera las dos historias son como dos caras de una moneda, a quienes les toca vivir la catastrofe desde afuera y a los que les toca formar parte de ella. traumante para ambos (obvimanete en distintas medidas) pero si, creo que es un libro de lo que es que tu vida este marcada por la guerra, y de como nuestra humanidad perciste en las peores condiciones, ya sea al ayudar a un desconocido o al entregarte a las matematicas,,, no se. fuera de lo impactante de la historia, me gusto mucho la narracion. es lo primero que leo de mathias, pero muchas reseñas dicen que no es su mejor libro. me sorprende porque me gusto mucho. en partes es mas poesia que narrativa, y su flujo de conciencia combinado con discurso indirecto libre (pero en cocaina) me sorprendio mucho. quisiera leer más de el.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relatively short but still too long. The plot line of the man and woman escaping the Balkan war of the ‘90s is so detailed it feels repetitive even if it’s technically not, and the math conference plot line—generally quite interesting—reaches a kind of presumed climax in chapter 24 which, at 30+ pages, feels like 300. Much too much inessential information.

[Marika · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[starlabev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Énard il politropo, il poliglotta, l'apolide, il precipuo.

[Kip Kyburz · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other have noted, it's two separate novellas, and while there is some interstitial tissue in the themes presented, it truly feels like two different narratives told simultaneously. Are they esquisitely written? Most certainly. But I might need to search out more reviews to see why this structure.

[looneybooks79 · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://looneybooks79.blog/2024/09/23...

Een naamloze soldaat, een deserteur, wandelt door de bergen richting een hut uit zijn jeugd waar hij schuilen kan. Maar dan komt een vrouw met een oude ezel op zijn pad. Zij kent hem uit het dorp waar ze zelf van wegvlucht. Die herkenning verandert haar leven.

Op 11 september 2001 is in Havel, op een boot op de Wannsee, een colloquium voor Paul Heudeber, een wiskundige die ooit nog in Buchenwald in het concentratiekamp heeft verbleven. Zijn vrouw, Maja, verliet hem jaren later om te kiezen voor een politieke carrière in het westen. Paul, overtuigd communist, ook de reden waarom hij werd opgepakt, bleef in de zaak geloven, verhuisde er zelfs voor naar Oost-Duitsland (BRD). Maar blijft zijn geloof in dit communisme wel bestaan? Zijn dochter Irina neemt het voortouw op het colloquium om hem te eren maar, terwijl elders in de wereld een vreselijke historische gebeurtenis zich voordoet, begint Irina aan de draadjes van het verleden te trekken en ontrafelt geheimen die ze nooit had voorzien.

Twee verschillende verhaallijnen die niks met elkaar schijnen te maken te hebben. Het ene is hard, ruw en laat niks aan de verbeelding over. Het andere is doorspekt met het verleden en herinneringen over een oorlog die ooit is geweest en sporen nalaat terwijl een nieuwe nakende oorlog zich aankondigt, door de aanslag op de World Trade Center in New York.

Beide verhalen zijn geïnspireerd door de inval van Rusland in Oekraïne. Mathias Énard vond het nodig dit boek te schrijven door twee verhalen te vertellen. De enige link tussen beide verhalen is het gegeven oorlog en hoe mensen omgaan met de veranderingen die dat teweegbrengt. Net zoals de soldaat geen naam krijgt, weten we ook niet voor welke oorlog hij vlucht. Het zou de huidige oorlog kunnen zijn die heerst tussen Oekraïne en Rusland, maar evengoed die in Bosnië in de jaren negentig, Afghanistan in de jaren tachtig of zelfs een van de wereldoorlogen… Oorlog is universeel en kent maar één constante: ze is wreed en kent geen genade!

Het verhaal van de deserteur kon me helemaal boeien en, had wat mij betreft, nog verder mogen uitgediept worden, was ook het deel in dit boek waar ik volledig in geïnvesteerd was. En hoewel de beide verhaallijnen, die afwisselend een hoofdstuk besloegen, op een dusdanige poëtische en prozaïsche manier waren geschreven met een paar van de prachtigste zinnen die ik dit jaar al las in een boek, vond ik het ontbreken van een echte link tussen de verhalen en het langdradige gepalaver over Paul Heudebers wiskundige onderzoeken vaak net iets te saai. Enard verwacht van zijn lezers net iets te veel wiskundig talent om mee te zijn in die verhaallijn.

Desondanks dit heb ik genoten van dit boek, mede en vooral dankzij de tocht van de deserteur, het meisje en haar oude ezel. Het is ook de cover van dit boek dat me ontzettend aansprak.

[Jesus Gonzalez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narra dos historias en capitulos alternos.

Un soldado de una guerra no identificada, actual y en Europa. Deserta y trata de llegar a la frontera. Se encuentra con una mujer, tambien huida, violada, maltratada. En estos capitulos no hay dialogos. El estilo en la narracion es magistral, poetico.

Por otro lado el dia del atentado de Torres Gemelas homenajean a un matematico de Alemania Este. Esta su viuda, politica en Alemania Oeste, su hija y prestigiosos matematicos. Narra la vida del hombre, prisionero en campos nazis, su amor por su mujer, que aunque existia el muro el podia pasar a occidente en numerosos congresos y su hija le visitaba. Tenia un status privilegiado con el gobierno.

Son dos historias muy bien narradas, aunque yo personalmente no encuentro el nexo que las une

[Alex-Mot-à-Mots · Rating 1 out of 5]

"... une densité romanesque inversement proportionnelle à sa dépense de mots". Déjà, cette phrase aurait dû me faire hésiter.
J'ai tout de même commencé ma lecture, mais les faits présentés aléatoirement n'ont pas aidé à me faire entrer dans les récits.
Et puis ce soldat qui ne fait pas grand chose : beaucoup de mots pour ne dire aucune action.
Et puis à la page 80, l'auteur n'était pas encore entré dans le vif du sujet avec le mathématicien Paul.
C'est sans doute un roman construit comme une résolution de problème mathématique. Sans doute. Je ne suis pas allée assez loin pour l'éprouver.
Mais ma lecture du premier tiers de ce roman a été éprouvante (manque de patience ?)
J'ai fini par lâcher l'affaire.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dreamed of you this morning war is here
I dreamed of you all around me
Vibrating
A gentle explosion my heart of your presence
War is here this morning I dreamed of you
Perfect as the equations that send the shells flying
Perfect as the obviousness of the equations
Perfect as violence
Whole
You were there in me
I was alone
Everyone could talk of nothing but the war
I had nothing but you
And the sadness of your disappearance

Told through the medium of two parallel narratives that never entwine, Mathias Enard's latest brainstorming masterpiece concerns itself with both the devastations wrought by war and a pure critique of the complex vision of a great mathematician concerned with such abstruse topics as abstract algebra, number theory, and topology. While the first narrative navigates the treacherous course through the trenches of some nameless war, one must flee; the second narrative wades through the algebraic and topological concerns of the great mathematician, which is, at times, interspersed by fragments of his correspondences with his wife and daughter. A good example of these figurative modes of entanglement can be ascertained by sampling the following text taken from his treatise Conjectures:

Walk, step
I count one at each prime number of steps
I count one
I calculate π(x) for x steps
Walk, step
I count π(x) for x days
Euler is walking with me
I search for the smallest of the powers of infinity
The name of the last finitude is around me
I know the leap there is
Between the last finite thing and the first infinity
The sum of the inverses of numbers raised to the power n
Infinity in finitude
I walk
I add the infinitely small
I collapse
I walk
I add a fragment of infinitely small
I keep adding till I get to the ceiling
I walk in seclusion
The series of the inverses of prime numbers raised to the power n advances in seclusion
Walk, step
The steps converge –
The steps converge and everything tends towards nothingness
Walk, step
Behind the decimal point of nothingness
I count a prime number of steps
I count the dead
I count the living
Walk, step
There are no people in numbers
There is nothing in calculations
Nothing in the real part
Nothing in whole numbers
And each second of my life
(Complex singularity)
Is in the language of pain
Imaginary part,
Walk, step
Blows
I count the blows
I count one at each prime number of the dead.

(Paul Heudeber, Ettersberg Conjectures, Second Conjecture, Corollary One, ‘Counting’)

The second narrative goes into great detail about the mathematician (Paul Heudeber), a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia. In parallel, the first narrative about a soldier fleeing from some unwanted war is a fragmented stream of consciousness narrative that borrows a lot from Faulkner, but the rigors that such a mode of narration entails do not diminish the bit the artistic simplicity of the setting. The Deserters, in a sense, is a harbinger of the downfall of the Communist dream (the second narrative) as well as a forerunner of the terrible shape of things to come (the first narrative).

Mathias Enard here, as usual, is quite generous with his bag of literary tricks. His prose style never diminishes to please the reader, affording at once the sensory delights of the setting as well as going deep into the psyche of his characters. And besides, the mode of narration is always befitting of a modernist text that always seeks to improvise and experiment with the sense of time, people, and place in the modern novel. He is a modern innovator like no other. His previous effort (published last year) The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild was an abstruse work of art. In this new work we find him in his element albeit in a much less grand and much more constrained fashion. He is, indeed, one of my favourite modern writers.....
FOUR STARS...THIS IS GRAND, INDEED!!!