Zone

Publishers Weekly

Homeric in its scope and grandeur, remarkable in its detail, Énard's American debut is a screaming take on history, war, and violence. Francis Servain Mirkovic, the son of a French father and a Croatian mother, is a spy whose job it is to resell stolen secrets to their legitimate owners. His "Zone" is the Mediterranean. It is the early 21st century and he is on his last mission, taking a train from Milan to Rome under a fake name and revisiting, in a blistering stream-of-consciousness (periods are few and far between), his childhood, his career, and various women, among them Sashka, the Russian painter he plans to meet in Rome; Marianne, from his youth; and Stéphanie, his fellow agent. Weighing heavily on him is his time with the Croatian army during the "Yugoslav madness," where he witnessed and took part in atrocities. As Francis's train speeds along, his story picks up momentum, becoming nearly frantic by the final stretch. Mandell's translation of the extravagant text is stunning. (Dec.)

Library Journal

Emulating the rhythm of a locomotive as well as the train of human thought, this modern epic by Enard (Arabic, Univ. of Barcelona) is written as a single sentence, transcribing the mental wanderings of one man as he travels by train from Milan to Rome. Francis, a French Croatian intelligence agent specializing in war crimes, is carrying a list of names in a briefcase that he intends to sell to certain individuals at his destination, an event he refers to as "the end of the world." Through his thoughts and memories, "so many images linked by an uninterrupted thread," the nature of the list is slowly revealed, along with the details of his own involvement in the wars and violence of the region he calls the Zone: the Balkans, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Algeria, and other areas of the Mediterranean. Literary references abound, from The Iliad to Dalton Trumbo and Ezra Pound. VERDICT Enard's novel is a stylistic triumph and an artistic achievement, comparable in ambition and scope to Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Accessibility is a different matter; only the most intrepid readers are advised to embark on this journey.—Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston

Stephen Burn

Though the reader is marooned in Mirkovic's consciousness for more than 500 pages, the boundaries of his skull do not feel claustrophobic, because the mind at work in the novel is remarkably elastic…The 150,000-word sentence that makes up Énard's erudite and ambitious novel is certainly an attempt to create a Flaubertian encyclopedia of our times at the end of a violent century. But this millennial archive also measures guilt—it passes sentence, as it were, on both the regrets and memories of Énard's narrator and the larger guilt and shame that he describes as "the weight of Western civilization."
—The New York Times