Compass
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world
Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.
With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This astonishing, encyclopedic, and otherwise outr meditation by nard (Zone) on the cultural intersection of East and West takes the form of an insomniac's obsessive imaginings dreams, memories, and desires which come to embody the content of a life, or perhaps several. Franz Ritter is a musicologist who, though steeped in European culture, has yearned throughout his life for the the East; its poets, cities, and sensibility. In this opium addict's dream of a novel, we retrace Ritter's adventures in Palmyra, where he sleeps among the Bedouin; in Istanbul, on nights spent in the company of a debauched Prussian archeologist; and in Damascus, among the ruins where Ritter searches out "the reverie and sensual sweetness of the Arabian Nights." The erudite Ritter also recalls episodes from the lives of historical personages such as Franz Liszt, Fernando Pessoa, and the Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat, the last of whom happens to have been the subject of a dissertation by Ritter's unrequited love object, the equally cultured Sarah. It is to thoughts of Sarah, with whom Ritter parted in Damascus, that Ritter returns most frequently, hoping to reunite with her even as actual events in the Islamic world intrude on Ritter's fantasies of Ottomans and sultans. Though occasionally exhausting, Compass is a document of the West's ongoing fascination with all things Oriental, richly detailed, and a cerebral triumph of learning, as well as translation. For readers who ask literature to do what history and politics cannot, unraveling nard's arabesque yields a bounty.
