Imprinted Life discussion

Reviews:

… L A Times

… Guardian

… Washington Post. Interesting findings:

"Set in Vienna over the course of one sleepless December night, “Compass” consists of his rambling, panicky and erudite inner monologue";

"highlighting the manifold, vital contributions of Islamic and other Middle Eastern cultures to the European canon."

Interesting choice for a biography group, Asma? Isn't this fiction? It, however, comes across as a very unique book if I am reading the reviews correctly! But perhaps the scope of imaginative literature is an expansion of the older theme for Imprinted Lives? I'm curious.

Haaze,
I try different themes from time to time, the current one you note being the Man Booker International. As you know from participation in TWL group, my interest lies in international literature and in translated works -- the perspective from writers abroad. As Énard's book develops, the main character, being a well-traveled and cultured musicologist, is deep into literary authors of Europe who experienced the historical artifacts, as well as the spirit, of Istanbul and other cities.
Asma.

It is a very alluring book, that definitely seems to be resting in the zone between the typical genres. It is probably a good thing. Have you started to read it yet?

Fascinating reading. Over the course of one night until dawn, an ailing musicologist narrates his memories of Middle Eastern travel and of unrequited love for an Orientalist.

Reviews

Europe Now

"Compass is a novel about many things. At its surface it is about the pull of unmet dreams and ambitions. The falsities of love. But at the crux of this examination of a human life is the fabric of cultures intersecting—and in the truth that the pathos of grief exempts no one."

Conversational Reading. Scott Esposito's blog

The link to the 'Fitzcarraldo playlist' of songs for Compass;

"Franz Ritter is interested in the influence of Eastern composers on Western music [...] And then in the other direction [...]"

"One of the themes of Compass is the importance of the Other and the danger of over-identifying with one particular nationality; the only way we as humans can grow, spiritually and emotionally, is to be open to ‘foreign’ cultures and to realize that nationalism is a construct — there is no such thing as a fixed identity."

Similarly,

"One of the themes of the book is the importance of learning that one’s identity is not fixed but fluid; a person is not defined by his or her nation or genes but by their openness to the other, to the seemingly foreign, to the new and strange."

The Modern Novel – A Blog

Characters: Franz Ritter, Sarah, Herr Gruber;

Setting: Vienna, and memories describe Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, Tehran;

Title: Sarah's gift of a compass to Franz that points eastward.

Haaze wrote: "It is a very alluring book [...] Have you started to read it yet?"

I'm enjoying the story. Also, the physical book is ergonomically comfortable and its print is sharp.

Comments from the internet about "Compass"

The Modern Novel's synopsis of "Compass". I like those, as they are a preview of the story. If spoilers bother you, then you might prefer an analysis like the next link.

Quotations from Yaëlle Azagury's review of "Compass".

"If the Orient has fascinated for centuries, it is because it enabled us to escape from ourselves, investigate the idea of difference, probe the self within the other."

"Instead, posits Enard through Sarah, we must revisit history as one of diversity and common sharing. East and West do not occur as competing narratives. Rather, the history of this binarism rests on the porosity of their outlines, on a continuum of cultural hybridity and mutual borrowings."

I'll probably reread Azagury's article to grasp the ideas in it.

Very important is the translation of this French novel during a WWB interview. How she came in on the job to also translate Énard's Zone, the translator Charlotte Mandell reveals in that episode.

I gather that the protagonist Franz Ritter, as well as Ritter's creator Énard, experienced the Middle Eastern cities when travel there was still a possibility. One of those remembered experiences happens in the ancient city of Palmyra.

"[...] in Palmyra the old stones were so numerous they comprised all the garden furniture in the Zenobia Hotel: capitals of columns used as tables, the columns themselves for benches, rubble for the flowerbeds, the terrace borrowed widely from the ruins it abutted." pp 146-47, "Compass", New Directions, 2017.

The abundance of 'stones' is observable in this video by UNESCO. And, the Zenobia (formerly Kattenah) Hotel, referred to, is probably the namesake of the legendary, third century queen.

"Zenobia became one of the most popular figures of the ancient world in the legends of the Middle Ages, and her legacy as a great warrior-queen and clever ruler, surrounded by the wisest men of her time, influenced painters, artists, writers, and even later monarchs such as Catherine the Great of Russia (1729-1796 CE), who compared herself to Zenobia and her court to that of Palmyra." (Joshua J. Mark, Ancient History Encyclopedia)

That hotel is a component in a story the character Sarah tells, according to this article in Middle Orient by Ulrich von Schwerin © Qantara.de 2016, translated by Katy Derbyshire:

"Franz Ritter, a specialist on the influence of Oriental music on European classical composers plagued by memories and an unnamed illness, paces his Vienna apartment on a sleepless night, remembering his days as a student in Damascus and a trip to Palmyra, then still a peaceful oasis in the Syrian desert.

The narrator beds down by a campfire outside the citadel above the ruins of the ancient Roman town, along with the adored but forever unreachable Sarah, a half-crazed German archaeologist and a French historian, who keeps his friends occupied in the freezing hours before sunrise by telling them about the murderous French adventuress Marga d’Andurain, who ran Palmyra’s Hotel Zenobie.

Named after the third-century queen, the hotel boasted a fabulous view of the Baal temple [...]"

Along with many cultural references about music, art, literature, and history, the memory of travel to Middle Eastern cities is entwined in the narrative.

The title of a review about Compass, "Compass by Mathias Énard review – a dreamlike study of Orientalism" by Steven Poole, certainly brings to mind Edward Said's Orientalism . The 1978 book looked at the west's perceptions about the east, fictionalizing the unknown as 'otherness' and theorizing from that. Wikipedia's description of that book, indicates the west's appellation of otherness on the east.

"[...] Western writings about the Orient, the perceptions of the East presented in Orientalism, cannot be taken at face value, because they are cultural representations based upon fictional, Western images of the Orient."

In Compass, though, Franz Ritter's dream revives western literature, music, and art, which exhibited eastern characteristics, perhaps with feigned realism. He recalls his travel in middle eastern cities. Does he see them as someone else would do so? How would the dwellers of those cities view him from the occident as well as view themselves? Rather than unidirectionality, an exchange of perceptions is going on. Poole notes that Compass's main character Franz Ritter

"argues, the Orient is an imaginary construction for east and west, a joint enterprise of consensual hallucination and fecund source of inspirations; Europe itself is a “cosmopolitan construction” of both sides."

An article by Justin Taylor also addresses orientalism in the novel Compass. Franz dreams about both his earlier journeys into the middle east and his love interest there with Sarah a specialist in orientalism.

"All Ritter’s happiest memories are of time spent with Sarah in the Middle East, especially Syria: “Aleppo was a city of stone, with endless labyrinths of covered souks leading to the glacis of an impregnable fortress, and a modern city, with parks and gardens, built around the train station, the southern branch of the Baghdad Bahn, which put Aleppo a week away from Vienna via Istanbul and Konya as early as January 1913….”

Franz and Sarah share a view of the Orient and Europe, which is dissimilar from a colonial view. Rather than a polarity of east and west, Sarah is in quest of oneness, recognizing union of other and self as an universal aspiration. Taylor's words are

"Sarah calls for a search “beyond the stupid repentance of some or the colonial nostalgia of others, a new vision that includes the other in the self. On both sides."

Does Sarah's aim have a chance of attainment? Taylor hints that dispassionate objectivity, at least for Franz, is inconsistent with his passion for Sarah. Fidelity to truth goes quickly into fanciful metaphor more akin to Franz's imagination than to Sarah's real life and sway.

"Ritter himself is a knot of contradiction: He implores his reader to “cherish the other in the self, recognize it, love this song that is all songs” but blithely remarks of his putative beloved, “Everything is her fault, the swish of a petticoat sweeps a man away more surely than a typhoon.” (Speaking of “the violence of imposed identities,” does anyone believe that Sarah has ever worn a petticoat?)"

In the author and translator interviews for the 2017 Man Booker International award, Mathias Enard says about his novel,

"The other, alterity, is one of the themes in the heart of Compass. The Other whom we desire, whom we seek to know, whose differences attract us – the other whom we approach through love, passion, friendship or knowledge."

In the same set of interviews, translator Charlotte Mandell says that she translates without the bias of knowing the whole story at once. So, she doesn't read ahead of the section of text she's translating; she lives in the page before her guided by its "language".

"I would want language to lead me where it liked – I wouldn’t want to know beforehand what I was going to write."

Her approach to translation seems to assimilate self and other.

The above articles have been valuable in interpreting this complex novel about memory, psychology, and cultural transmission.

Mathias Énard photographed by Heike Huslage-Koch during the Leipzig Book Fair in March 2017. Énard's novel "Compass" was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.

As the main character Franz Ritter is a musicologist of Iranian music, so the eponymous title Compass makes a musical reference. David Pocknee's "What some dead white guy did: a statistical topology of keyboard usage in Beethoven's sonatas for pianoforte" refers to the term 'compass' as a range of octaves, more octaves presumably enabling a composer to write more varied compositions. The expanded range of octaves, offering opportunities for more variety within a composition, parallels Énard's broad range of cultural matters, people, and places. Ritter divulges those memories, which range from personal experiences and scholarly knowledge, during a sleepless night of centuries.

Another reference to the replica of Beethoven's eastward pointing compass Franz describes a few pages (298-301) inside chapter 3:45 A.M. The original compass presumably is among a European museum's collection of the composer's personal possessions.

"Beethoven owned a compass. A little metal compass, made of copper or brass, that you can see in a case next to his cane. A pocket compass, round, with a cover, very similar to today's models it seems to me. A beautiful colorful face with a magnificent wind rose."

Franz describes how Sarah, who before she gifted it to him, altered the instrument to point eastwards, and he explains the procedure she used. Sarah calls the compass,

"one of the rare compasses that point to the Orient, the compass of Illumination, the Suhrawardian artifact. A mystical diviner's wand"

Suhrawardi, a twelfth-century Persian mystic and philosopher", influenced later disciples with his metaphysics during dark ages elsewhere. There's a detailed explanation of eastern and western history in Énard's passages on the subject of the compass.

As the novel-long dream concludes at daybreak, Franz Ritter is dreaming of Sarah's message, either from Sawarak (Borneo, east Malaysia) or from Darjeeling (West Bengal, India). It bemoans being far from lovely Vienna, but to Franz that desire and the language in which it's framed resemble the songsters Piaf and Barbara rather than the poets "Rimbaud, Rumi, Hafez".

Ritter's dream turns to Franz Schubert's Frühlingstraum (Dream of Spring), part of the winter song cycle "Winterreise" (1828), English translation, Part 1, Chapter 4, No. 11. In the spring song, a dreamer imagines the warmth of spring and love, a pleasurable hopefulness symbolic of the long-flowing movement of the Danube away into the Black Sea or of the hopeful Songs of Dawn sung throughout time in Europe, the Middle East, and India. Schubert's lyrics parallel Ritter's hopefulness as morning breaks after a dreamy night of travels, reminiscences, and unrequited love. It's okay to take pleasure in hope:

"you have to see everything through the spectacles of hope, cherish the other in the self, recognize it, love this song that is all songs, ever since the Songs of Dawn by the troubadours, by Schumann and all the ghazals of creation, you're always surprised by what always comes". (Compass, p444)

Robert Schumann's song of dawn "Gesänge der Frühe" Op.133 (1853) is here.

Joshua Cohen in the the NYTimes (June 30, 2017) notes that Énard "refers to Said prophet-style, as “the Great Name.”"

"The debate became stormy; Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said."
[Mathias Enard. "Compass". Google Books]

I don't know with certainty whether that designation ever again replaces Said's name elsewhere in "Compass".