Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmee de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre. Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, Blanchot, and many other distinguished authors. She has received many accolades and awards for her translations, including a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Zone.
‘[Zone is] an ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and
disaster … Enard does for the comma in Zone what Eimear McBride did
for the full stop in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and just as
McBride brought her writing a raw intensity and immediacy, Enard
brings to his a similarly fierce political engagements and moral
authority … Enard’s novel is to be seen within a tradition of
French avant-garde writing ... The result is a modern
masterpiece…’
— David Collard, Times Literary Supplement
‘[T]he brilliance of Zone lies in its brutal refusal to stop. Again
and again, Mathias Enard’s white-knuckle narrative plunges us back
into the battle-scarred past, forcing us to confront its horrors
... a relentlessly inventive novel.’
— David Winters, Literary Review
‘I haven’t read anything this worthy of publication in years, nor
this stylistically and thematically interesting, this politically
and literarily engaged, this exciting and gripping, this moving and
heart-breaking and this – the real kicker given that Zone is a 521
page stream of consciousness – readable. Zone is as close to a
flawless novel as I have encountered in a very, very, long
time.’
— Scott Manley Hadley, The Triumph of the Now
‘[T]he material of a conventional thriller has been sublimated into
an atmosphere of violence, power and cruelty; humanity here is
little more than a vector through which various kinds of insanity
flow.’
— Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘Zone ... is a staggering literary achievement. A novel written on
the grandest scale, with the ambition of creating a modernist prose
epic with the scope of Homer or Ezra Pound's Cantos, it is at once
beautiful and encyclopaedic.’
— Thom Cuell, The Workshy Fop
‘Mathias Enard has found a way to restore death to life and life to
death, and so joins the first rank of novelists, the bringers of
fire, who even as they can’t go on, do.’
— Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions
‘The novel of the decade, if not of the century.’
— Christophe Claro, translator of Thomas Pynchon
‘Zone is a major and compelling work, a work that will keep you in
its grip from its first utterance to its last.’
— Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
‘Like Flaubert and James Joyce, Enard seems to have found a model
for his omnivorous novel in the Homeric epic, while Ezra Pound’s
ghost also haunts Zone.... Enard’s erudite and ambitious novel is
... a Flaubertian encyclopaedia of our times at the end of a
violent century.’
— Stephen Burn, New York Times
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
