Review by Booklist Review
Two seemingly unconnected narratives--one saturated with history, the other scrubbed of all historical referents--explore themes of trauma and loss in this formally inventive novel. In the first narrative, historian Irina Heudeber reconstructs the life of her father, mathematician and Buchenwald survivor Paul Heudeber, and her mother, Maja, free spirit and love of Paul's life, on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Besides old letters, Irina collects her own memories, especially those of a scholarly gathering on a riverboat near Wannsee, convened to celebrate her father's work but interrupted by news of the 9/11 attacks. In the second narrative, a nameless soldier, AWOL from a nameless war somewhere at the edge of Europe, navigates rough topographical and emotional terrain with the tense companionship of a nameless peasant woman and a (likewise nameless) half-blind donkey. If solace is to be found, it may be in the mountainous landscape and perhaps in the absence of names. Award-winning French novelist Énard uses the contrasting textures of his two narratives to sometimes unsettling but ultimately revelatory effect.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This brilliant interlocking diptych from Énard (Compass) begins with a soldier emerging from a battlefield into a nightmarish future. What has become of the world is a mystery, as is the identity of this haunted survivor. The answers may lie in a conference celebrating the work of the late mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, held aboard a cruise ship on the inauspicious date of September 11, 2001. In attendance are theorists and intellectuals, each with their own agenda and ax to grind. Chief among them is Heudeber's daughter, Irina, who's there to present a paper on the irrational numbers of Persian mystic Nasir al-Dun Tusi. Irina has an ulterior motive: to pry the secret of her father's life and suicide from his widow, Maja. What ensues is a fervent collage of letters, arguments, and confessions that spans from Buchenwald and the GDR to the fall of the Soviet Union and the Twin Towers. When Énard returns to the lone soldier, he's seen scaling an unforgiving rock face on the other side of which he discovers another survivor amid the ruins. With an unflinching depiction of civilization's decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from "the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future." It's a masterpiece. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Prix Goncourt--winning French author Énard's short novel maps the stark geometry between the Holocaust and 9/11, ideology and fate, truth and memory. In 1995, noted East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor, drowned, an apparent suicide. A quarter-century later, his daughter, Irina, muses on his time in the concentration camp, his unshakable devotion to mathematics ("the other name for hope"), and his exploits as an outspoken antifascist and Communist sympathizer. She also flashes back to Sept. 11, 2001, when she and her aged mother, a politically active "orphan of the Revolution," attended a celebration of her father's work at a floating conference on a boat outside Berlin. Following the terrorist attacks in America, "the night kept falling," recalls Irina, "our faith in a kind of peace…crumbling away." While Irina's recollections have the immediacy and directness of a diary, the novel's alternating narrative is told in a kind of purgatorial stream-of-consciousness poetry, voiced by a barely conscious male deserter fleeing an unnamed contemporary war and a rightfully fearful young woman he encounters in the mountains. (She's accompanied by an injured donkey, the book's hero.) Énard, whose 500-page novelZone (2010) consisted of a single-sentence monologue, draws eerie meaning from the odd particularities of the natural world: "a luminous puddle stretches out over the rocks, the pebbles, so many reefs on a dazzled sea, strewn with green inlets, something trembles…" Ultimately, the book is haunted by the endless cycle of war and cruelty. "You don't want the vexations of the past to suffocate you," says the deserter. How can we avoid that? For Heudeber, it's all in the numbers. A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe's most challenging authors. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
