1. Vibrations from Odessa

Bodies everywhere. ¹ Énard's To desert (Subtitle: Novel) from 2023 is a text of linguistic power that hits home. Imagine this book as a ballet of grief, memory, injury, pain, violence, and trauma. Almost unbearable in places, yet simultaneously full of tenderness and love. And alongside the poetry, there is mathematics, serving as "a veil laid over the world, adapting to the world's forms in order to completely envelop it," as it is described at one point. It is an attempt to survive the horrors of the concentration camp through mathematics. For many years, it was "a light in the night" for the protagonist, "a sense, just like seeing or hearing, and thus a way of perceiving nature." For Paul, mathematics is an escape into the world of the stars: "the celestial bodies, love, bodies, rings, ideals, all this collection that is so profoundly human that it cannot collapse because it remains within us, in the imaginary world." Hocine Bouhadjera sees the incorporation of mathematics in the novel as not consistently implemented: “The alleged ‘secret music of mathematics', which escapes most literary scholars, is staged by Mathias Énard at a single point in the narrative with a poem that only initiates will understand. Otherwise, there are no equations or algebraic, arithmetic, or geometric developments; he limits himself to the portrait of a depressed communist. What remains is an attempt to the To define the science of sciences: ‘Icy matter like the stars, divine language'"Unaffected, as if they had been invented for angels who have no sulfur to spend. Mathematics as solace, as it has been understood, but not the source of a possible salvation for the German scholar..." ² — Nevertheless, bodies are everywhere in this book. The women are the first victims in this very real world of violence; their battered bodies haunt the fleeing deserter (the second protagonist, now a hunter himself being hunted):

The body is not only the object of trauma, but also an instrument of investigation, for example in the dance of betrayal, a kind of choreography of Énard's book:

Mathias Énard himself also seems to be physically affected by his subject matter. The unplanned changes that his novel undergoes To desert The author explains what he has experienced as a consequence of his own dismay and crisis: "Being locked up, the events that burdened the year 2021, the war that is so close, so omnipresent and so sudden: all waves that drive me to the reefs." ³ A broadside against the writer, the impact of a military attack. The author as a probe, a feeler of the tremors, as flotsam in the tumult of history. Mathias Énard's novel project has fundamentally shifted, at the latest when the war of aggression against Ukraine upended his writing plans. "On February 24, 2022, the conflict hit my plans with full force." ⁴ Initially, it was intended to be a fictional biography of the East German mathematician Paul Heudeber. However, the author felt painfully reminded of the Yugoslav Wars, for example in Sarajevo, by the media images of the war in Odessa. He speaks of his obsessive fears, nightmares, and war traumas, which he feels compelled to explore in greater depth in the book in light of this renewed war on European soil: “The novel I planned could no longer be the same. The resurrection of the discourse—Nazis, denazification—brought the 1940s right back to us. Russia embraced its imperialism. It flaunted its violence with pride. The colors of the 1990s (winter, blood, fire) once again stained Europe. The Soviet T-72 tanks, those flat green boxes we had seen in the deserted cornfields of Pannonia, shelling Vukovar, rolled toward Odessa, and their crews, these Russian soldiers under twenty, burned three to a pulp, trapped within their armor, as a Javelin missile ripped open their shell like tearing a chick’s head off with its teeth. Through the trees, one could see animals again—” Pigs, dogs – wander onto our screens, often gruesomely mutilated before being killed with a bayonet. Odessa, the Alexandria of the Black Sea, was to suffer the same fate as Sarajevo.” ⁵

The early novel was only published in German in 2023. The perfect shot Lothar Müller comments on Énard's appearance in the Süddeutsche Zeitung this point in time in a similar way to the historical shock that Énard describes as the writing time of To desert He argues: "The fact that this slim novel is now being published in German, twenty years later, is likely related to the war in Ukraine." ⁶ Anyone who reads the latest book To desert If one reads the ship as a resonating body, one will almost physically absorb the vibrations (which, incidentally, are frequently addressed in Énard's books). The shock of September 11, 2001, spreads like a physical pressure wave and affects everything, including the planned scientific conference on the mathematician Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, on a ship on the Havel River near Berlin: "On September 11, 2001, when the violence shook the ship Beethoven, which was moored off Peacock Island, like waves spreading on water." ⁷Vibrations are tremors, perceptible oscillations for those with an organ for them. Literature can act like a sensor, a receptor, making resonances visible, acting as a detector, a visualization of wave dynamics, tracing patterns, layering them, and thus generating tension.

The countless weapons of war – Énard does not spare us their names – produce a sudden vibration in the air; violence is unpredictable; violence is this traumatizing shock to the victims, pain and terror and screams and fear, loss and exile, condensed here as the quiet whir of the projectile:

Wars have dominated Enard's literary work since his debut novel. La Perfection du tir from 2003 (German) The perfect shot, 2023 ⁸ ) about a ruthless sniper in the civil war (possibly in Beirut); Areas from 2008 (German translation 2010) is an epic monologue during a train journey, covering topics including the Israeli-Palestinian war; the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is a subject in it. Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants (2010, German edition 2011), Rue des thieves (2012, German translation 2013) is set amidst the uprisings of the Arab Spring and Islamist terrorists.

Antoine Perraud reads Énard as a narrator of horror—and of moments of redemption: “Mathias Énard, arguably the most gifted writer of his generation, explores in his work with dense grace how much horror takes over. […] But sometimes a single being can restrain the rage. This is like the redemption of the species, however fragile or temporary the merciful gesture may be.” ⁹ While the mathematician Paul was arrested in Liège in 1941 as a resistance fighter and survived Buchenwald, in the book's second story, a deserter, a welder by trade, hidden in a mountain cave on the Mediterranean, still carrying the weapon of the war he is fleeing, roams the mountainous regions of his wild, lonely childhood, seeking exile, that is, crossing his country's borders. Énard had already explored this history of violence in the Mediterranean region in Areas The story is told as a stream of consciousness during a long train journey. Even here we encounter deserters who, upon arrest, are fair game, without any protection.

The fleeing deserter in the latest novel is also very aware of this danger:

This is comparable to the neorealist equation of rain and reality in Rossellini's film. Through Saint Francis of Assisi, Énard paints pictures of the individual's existential vulnerability, here in the case of the fleeing woman whom the deserter encounters in the wilderness:

When this apocalyptic rain finally ends, the homeless woman says her prayer (which is addressed to the Cinq Prières pour le temps de la guerre (recalled from Francis Jammes, with which Énard opens his book): “God, I beg you for forgiveness, is it also your heaven that has struck me and us, we deserve nothing but war and fire, there is no strength, no power except in God,” ¹⁰ Is the deserter's encounter with the woman in the mountains to be understood allegorically as an opportunity to confront past guilt? His struggle is an expression of a double war: the war he is fleeing and the war that has not yet been exorcised from within him.

The dual narrative of the mathematician and the deserter forms a wave-like superimposition; resonances between the two stories emerge in Énard's double wave recordings of violence and war. If one takes the publisher's announcement seriously, then the text is no longer an epic historical panorama like... Areas, but an arrangement that resembles a dynamic tableau of ut pictura poetry Two equations, two wave movements, can mutually interfere; this reading, however, should not be narrative but poetic: “From the tension between these two narratives arises, as if by a kind of magic—poetic, spatial, mathematical—all that transpires in love as in politics between commitment and betrayal, between loyalty and clarity, between hope and survival. Mathias Enard unfolds here an economy of silence and vibration that generates a novelistic density inversely proportional to its expenditure of words. Since war is history, both yesterday and today, it equips us To desert with images and conjectures to decipher the random equations.” ¹¹

2. Ghosts in Weimar

Énard's Orientalism is a fractured, or rather critical, one. Using the example of European tourists to Tangier, Énard already explored this in his work. Rue des thieves They laugh at their Orientalist imagery from One Thousand and One Nights. Weimar is connected to the Orient in many ways, besides the ginkgo and Goethe, with Herder, Schiller and India, with Wieland and his Djinnistan. Énard's novel Function  German Oriental Studies reports how To desert from a colloquium, held there at the residence of the first great Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who One Thousand and One Nights He had translated, he had taught the poet Rückert Persian, and thus, according to Énard, connected Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder with 19th-century Orientalism and the poetry of Hafiz. The mathematician father of the daughter-narrator of To desert He had such a mentor, or rather a female mentor, the (not fictional) scientist Emmy Noether, who fled into exile in the USA in 1933 and is beautifully honored here.

The topography of also To desert The story is open; besides the unnamed Mediterranean region of the fleeing deserter, the resistance fighter Paul is not only to be found in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but also in Camp Gurs north of the Pyrenees, in Liège in eastern Belgium, and after his liberation from Buchenwald (a word he cannot pronounce), he settles in (East) Berlin, where the posthumous conference in his honor is then linked to New York via the September 11 attacks. To desert We also encounter the work of the Arabian Nights, viewed through the perspective of Tusi, a scientist in the Baghdad of knowledge and poetry, who can stand as a mirror for the ethos of the mathematician Paul in socialism, as an idealism of mathematical abstraction; not least, the narrator's colloquium contribution as a laudation for her father Paul Heudeber is entitled "Mathematics and Resistance" (VIII.).

So is To desert Another book by Énard with an East-West reflection, Paul as a modern-day woman, however, does not prove to be as unwavering as his predecessor, for he only appears as an unshakable optimist until his imprisonment in the concentration camp: "one almost has the impression that he is a different person, before the torture, before the despair," it says at one point.

Ghosts of German history haunt Weimar. "Three times in this century, the public invocation of Goethe and Weimar Classicism has been linked to an epochal shift in German history," wrote Karl Robert Mandelkow in 1999. "In 1919, with Friedrich Ebert's speech at the National Assembly in Weimar, his invocation of the 'Spirit of Weimar' as a counterpoint to the 'Spirit of Potsdam' after the collapse of the German Empire. In 1932, with the celebration of Goethe's 100th death anniversary on the eve of Nazi rule, which, with the restoration of the 'Spirit of Potsdam,' marked the end of the 'Spirit of Weimar' proclaimed by Ebert. And in 1949, with the celebration of Goethe's 200th birthday, which was overshadowed by the establishment of two German states." ¹² In Function  Énard has already had several layers of Weimar's intellectual and cultural history characterized by a single figure:

The long-running debate about Thomas Mann, who visited Weimar, and Buchenwald can be found, for example, in his Doctor Faustus mirrored:

Meanwhile, a transatlantic general forces the population of Weimar to march past the crematoria of the local concentration camp and declares them—one might say, unjustly?—declares these citizens, who went about their business with apparent respect and tried to remain ignorant, even though the stench of burning human flesh wafted into their nostrils—declares them complicit in the now exposed horrors to which he forces them to turn their eyes. Let them look—I look with them, I let myself be pushed along in spirit by their dull or even shuddering ranks.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by His Friend, XLVI.

In his second book on Buchenwald, Jorge Semprún What a beautiful Sunday! (1980) Léon Blum walks with Goethe to the Buchenwald/Weimar concentration camp:

Then Goethe took me by the arm again and had me take a few steps towards the camp gate.

“Do you see this inscription?” he asked me, “To each his ownI don't know who the author is, who took the initiative. But I find it very significant and very encouraging that such an inscription adorns the entrance gate to a place of deprivation of liberty, of re-education through forced labor. For what does it ultimately mean? To each his ownIsn't that an excellent definition of a society formed to defend the freedom of all, the freedom of the general public, even if necessary at the expense of excessive and unfortunate individual freedom? I told you so more than a century ago, and you have echoed it in your conversations Recorded under the date, Monday, July 9, 1827. Do you remember that?

Jorge Semprún, What a beautiful Sunday!

The suffocating proximity of things, which Énard speaks of, is taken to absurd lengths in Goethe's unbearably humanistic reflection on the camp slogan. Equally affected and perplexed, the narrator draws a connection between her story and the war in Ukraine, between Russian aggressors and contemporary Ukrainian—and German!—right-wing extremists.

At the same time, the 71-year-old narrator carries other "ghosts" of history in her bag on the trip to Weimar, including the Stasi files of her mother, Maja Scharnhorst, who had already been dead for a decade and a half. Her father, Paul, had laughed aloud when reading his own file, but was "more appalled by the language of the Stasi than by the actual facts that concerned him."

3. Conjectures and Metafiction

As metafictions historiographiques In a joint article with Dominique Viart, Wolfgang Asholt interpreted Énard's books, arguing that they transcend the (historical) novel as fiction, addressing and discussing historiographical problems and focusing on methodological and epistemological questions concerning the reconstruction of the past from a contemporary perspective. In this way, these metafictions emphasize the discontinuity between the factual event and its narration—that is, the tension between fiction and history that is constitutive of the novelistic narrative. This tension is reconstructed through the memory and consciousness of the remembering character. ¹³ For To desert This applies on the level of the author himself, as indicated, but also in the intertextual universe, for example, a scientific lecture by the narrator about the protagonist, a fictional record by the protagonist about his time in the camp: Paul Heudeber, Les Conjectures de l'Ettersberg: élégies mathématiques (Berlin: German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, 1947). German approximately: Conjectures from Ettersberg: Mathematical ElegiesThe term "conjecture" is used in textual criticism to describe the intervention of editors in a text to restore the presumed authorial intention in the case of a "corrupted" text. And indeed, there are remarks on the editorial history of this volume, which is indirectly linked to the entire question of testimonial literature, trauma, and the Holocaust from the perspective of the first quarter of the 21st century. This is presumably implied when Sébastien Omont concludes in his review: "To desert This can be interpreted as an indication that the recent wars have their roots in the illusory worlds of European history.” ¹⁴

Énard weaves trauma literature into his book in such a way that, on the one hand, the motif of the connection between science and literature, i.e., mathematics and poetry, is reflected in the book and its publication history, but on the other hand, the trauma text itself, rather than the trauma, takes center stage; the writing of these conjectures—free verses, truncated sentences, personal syntax—is connected with the “hungry body” of the post-traumatic protagonist (“je flottais quelque part entre ces gribouillis et mon corps affamé”).

A merging of the Weimar specters—humanity and the concentration camp—and her own father's book of conjectures in the narrator's imagination will only be hinted at here. Instead, as a final quotation, we present an excerpt from the fictional book of conjectures by the fictional Paul Heudeber, inserted into the narrative: a (here abridged) condensation of mathematics and poetry, death and trauma, which, like a prosimetrum, elevates Énard's book to the level of historiographical metafiction; one might hear echoes of Celan's Death Fugue.

In France, one of the first reactions stands out: To desert The pointed review by Bouhadjera stands out, in which Énard criticizes his status as a national writer and diagnoses this in his novel: “This text is that of an official writer: everything is polished in the two stories (a broadcast on France Culture Having this situation obviously doesn't excuse it). Every slight ambiguity is immediately defused: The novel resembles those German courses that shuttle between Berlin's eco-districts, the Wall, and the Stasi: syrupy and inconsistent." ¹⁵ To desert In my estimation, this is a stupendous, important, very contemporary French book that is perhaps missing from the longlists of the Goncourt and the Renaudot because in many ways it is as German as the 2015 Goncourt Prize winner. Function Mathias Énard has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature since 2021.

[NB The reviews by Omont and Bouhadjera were added after this review was published online.]

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. Some of the numerous body thematizations: “la trahison commence par le corps” — “un corps, un anneau – tu es sceau de toute chose, unique” — “plus la guerre s'éloigne et plus son corps se démonte” — “ton corps, après l'eau, après le soleil, perd l'odeur électrique, de graisse et de sang, que la guerre lui a donné” — “son visage, ses épaules, son corps était parcouru de terreur” — “la montagne elle-même, percée tel un corps mitraillé” — “je flottais quelque part entre ces gribouillis et mon corps affamé” — “son corps la retient prisonnière” — “de penser à l'arrestation de Paul, à son corps torturé" - "un corps déjà rongé par les oiseaux de proie et les charognards" - "il va laisser à son agonie ce corps inutile" - "il a donné ce coup de grâce à des corps tout à fait vivants qui s'ignoraient morts, les yeux bandés, des corps qui tombaient lourds et mats dans une fosse” — “elle sent son corps se briser en morceaux de feu” — “tous furent tués, leurs corps empilés” — “les astres, l'amour, les corps, les anneaux, les idéaux, tout ce fatras si profondément humain” — “il passe une éponge sur son corps pour en retirer le sang séché” — “les cadavres décoraient de couleurs l'entassement des gravats, des bleus de travail, des lambeaux de foulards rouges, écrasés avec le corps qui les portait” — “le corps de la Femme allongée sur la banquette de pierre est une réplique des corps qu'il a déshonorés à mort, un gisant pour des centaines de morts” — “des corps qui tombent des fenêtres, des tours qui s'effondrent” — “son corps une lave de douleur sans flammes” — “rien ne ensemble avoir de l'effet sur son corps engourdi” — “son corps encore moulu, chaque geste encore douloureux” — “il se revoit caressant ce corps agonisant dans la cabane” — “un corps qui n'est plus comme les autres, que tu désires exempt de souffrance, hors de douleur” — “on n'avait bien sûr jamais retrouvé son corps, identifié des mois plus tard d'après quelques fragments” — “son corps a été retrouvé, noyé” — “les formalités judiciaires concernant, je cite, l'expatriation du corps”.
   "Betrayal begins with the body" — "one body, one ring — you are the seal of everything, unique" — "the further away the war is, the more his body disintegrates" — "your body, after the water, after the sun, loses the electric scent of fat and blood that war gave it" — "his face, his shoulders, his body was laced with terror" — "the mountain itself, pierced like a body with machine-gun fire" — "I hovered somewhere between these scribbles and my hungry body" — "her body holds her captive" — "to think of Paul's arrest, of his tortured body" — "a body already devoured by birds of prey and scavengers" — "he will leave this useless body to its agony" — "he delivered that death blow to very much alive bodies, ignoring themselves as dead, blindfolded, bodies falling heavy and dull into a pit" — "she feels her body shattering into pieces of fire" — "everyone was killed, their bodies stacked” — “the stars, the love, the bodies, the rings, the ideals, all this profoundly human mess” — “he runs a sponge over his body to remove the dried blood” — “the corpses decorated the rubble pile with paints, work blouses, scraps of red scarves crushed with the body that wore them” — “the body of the woman lying on the stone bench is a replica of the bodies he has defiled to death, a cot for hundreds of dead” — “corpses falling from the windows, towers collapsing” — “his body a lava of pain without flames” — “nothing seems to have any effect on his numb body” — “his body still formed, every gesture still painful” — “he sees himself caressing this dying body in the hut” — “a body no longer like the others, the one you wish for, free from Suffering, free from pain" — "his body was of course never found, only identified months later from some fragments" — "his body was found, drowned" — "the legal formalities regarding, I quote, the denaturalization of the body".>>>
2. “La supposée « Musique secrète des mathématiques » qui échappe à la plupart des littéraires, Mathias Énard la met en scène à a second moment of récit, with a poem qu'uniquement les initiés comprendront. Sinon, nulle équation ni développement algébrique, arithmétiques ou géométriques, il se borne à un portrait de communiste déprimé. Remains of a tentative definition of the science of sciences: « Matière glacée comme les étoiles, langue divine. » Without affect, everything is available and invented for the angels, which is not necessary without dépenser. Les mathématiques comme consolation, on l'aura compris, mais non la source d'une possible rédemption pour le savant allerand…” Hocine Bouhadjera, “To desert : le bain tède de Mathias Énard", News, 20. September 2023.>>>
3. “L'enfermement, les événements qui ont pesé sur l'année 2021, la guerre, si proche, si present et si soudaine: autant de vagues qui me poussent vers les récifs.” Mathias Enard, To desert, Chapter IV, p. 35.>>>
4. “The 24th of February 2022, the conflict a frappé de plein fouet mes projects.” Mathias Enard, Publisher's page for the book.>>>
5. "Le roman que j'envisageais ne pouvait plus être le même. La résurrection du discours - nazis, dénazifier - fasait remonter les années 1940 jusqu'à nous. La Russie assumait son imperialisme. Elle brandissait sa violence comme une fierté. Les couleurs des années 1990 (hiver, sang, feu) teintaient de nouveau l'Europe. Les chars soviétiques T72, ces boîtes plates et vertes que nous avions vues dans les champs de maïs abandonnés de Pannonie tirer sur Vukovar, roulaient vers Odessa, et leurs équipages, ces soldiers russes de moins de vingt Ans, brûlaient vifs three par three, prisonniers de leur blindage, lorsqu'un missile Javelin ouvrait leur tank comme on arrache la tête d'un oisillon with les dents. À travers les arbres, on voyait de new les animaux – les cochons, les chiens – errer jusque sur nos écrans, souvent horriblement mutilés, avant d'être achevés d'un coup de baïonnette. Odessa, l'Alexandrie de la mer Black, allait subir le sort de Sarajevo.” Mathias Enard, Publisher's page for the book.>>>
6. Lothar Müller, “The Craft of Killing”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10. July 2023.>>>
7. “On September 11th, 2001, when the violence was avalanche, there were fires on the water itself, when the Beethoven battalion amarré en face de l'île aux Paons”, Mathias Énard, To desert, Chapter XXIV.>>>
8. See the reviews by Niklas Bender in the FAZ of April 22, 2023, “Raising the Craft of War to Art” and by Lothar Müller, “The Craft of Killing”, SZ of July 11, 2023.>>>
9. "The oeuvre of Mathias Énard, creator of the work and without the double generation, consists of an explorer, with a great deal of denseness, at the point of failure of the horreurs. […] Or a soul of his, parfois, endigue la fureur. Cela vaut rachat de l'espèce, aussi fragile ou provisoire que soit le geste miséricordieux.” Antoine Perraud, “«Déserter», de Mathias Enard: guerre et poésie mathématique”, La Croix, August 30, 2023.>>>
10. “Dieu, j'implore ton pardon, est-ce bien ton ciel qui vient de me frapper, de nous frapper, nous ne méritons que la guerre et le feu, il n'y a de force, de puissance, qu'en Dieu,” Mathias Énard, To desertXI.>>>
11. “The tension between the two récits of the world, according to a variety of magic – poetic, spatial, mathématic –, is what it is like, in love with politics, between the engagement and the trahison, between the fi délité and the lucidity, between the espoir and the survie. Mathias Enard déploie ici une économie du silence et de la vibration qui produit une densité romanesque inversement proportionalnelle à sa dépense en mots Puisque la guerre est l'Histoire en marche, here comme aujourd'hui, To desert nous arme des images et des conjectures pour en déchiffrer les équations aléatoires.” From the publisher's announcement.>>>
12. Karl Robert Mandelkow, “The Spirit of Weimar, the Legacy of Buchenwald and the Berlin Republic”, Tagesspiegel, August 26, 1999.>>>
13. See Wolfgang Asholt and Dominique Viart, “L'œuvre de Mathias Énard, les Incultes et le roman contemporain français: regards croisés”, in Mathias Énard and the study of the novel, Edited by Markus Messling, Cornelia Ruhe, Lena Seauve and Vanessa de Senarclens (Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2020), 4-30, here pp. 22ff.>>>
14. “On peut lire To desert “comme la suggestion that les wars récentes plongent leurs racines dans les faux-semblants de l'histoire européenne.” Sébastien Omont, “Europe furieuse”, Waiting for Nadeau, 20. September 2023.>>>
15. "Ce texte est celui d'un écrivain officiel: all est arrondi (avoir une émission sur France Culture ne pardonne pas visiblement) dans les deux récits. Toute petite ambiguïté is immédiatement désamorcée: le roman ressemble à ces cours d'allemand, qui “Oscillent between the eco-quartiers, the wall of Berlin and the Stasi: syrupy and inconsequent.” Hocine Bouhadjera, “To desert : le bain tède de Mathias Énard", News, 20. September 2023.>>>