Fiction
Compass: An evening with Mathias Énard
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Join internationally acclaimed French novelist Mathias Énard as he discusses his novel, Compass (New Directions), winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt and shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize.
In Compass, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting an ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as—over the centuries—the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, translators, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these reveries is Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—from Balzac and Proust, from Thomas Mann and Sadegh Hedayat—and binds them together in a hypnotic, magical way.
Author
Mathias Énard
Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Zone, and Street of Thieves–as well as being a translator from Persian and Arabic.