ZONE by Mathias Énard (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell) — reviewed by Thomas

Énard 's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the ‘Zone’), past and present. Énard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Énard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Énard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them.