Rovinj, Croatia
Zone
- Mathias Énard's extraordinary 517-page novel written in one churning,
horrifying gush of a sentence. Oh, yes, we spend the entire novel
inside the head of seasoned spy Francis Servain Mirković, listening to
his turbulent internal monologue, occasionally punctuated by nested
stories, as he travels by train from Milan to Rome to sell information
to the Vatican - a list of names and details from years of extreme
violence in the Zone, that is, the Mediterranean region stretching all
the way from Spain to Syria, with a particular focus on Bosnia, Serbia,
Slovenia, and his homeland of Croatia.
"you don't forget much in
the end, the wrinkled hands of Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Batavian, his
trembling mustache, the faces of Islamists tortured in the Qanatar
Prison, the photograph of the severed heads of the Tibhirine monks, the
reflections on the cupolas in Jerusalem, Marianne naked facing the sea,
the squeals of Andrija's pig, the bodies piled up in the gas trucks of
Chelmno, Stéphanie the sorrowful in front of Hagia Sophia, Sashka with
her brushes and paints in Rome, my mother at the piano in Madrid, her
Bach fugue in front of an audience of Croatian and Spanish patriots, so
many images linked by an uninterrupted thread that snakes like a
railroad bypassing a city..."
Mirković blends deeply personal
experiences with bloody, tortured historical events, and intertwines
them with literature and the arts. All of this floats freely in the
spy's consciousness, expressed, as noted above, in one continuous
sentence. And, as Stephen Burn pointed out in his New York Times
review, Mathias Énard may be using the English word "sentence" not only
as a grammatical construction but also as an act of judgment, akin to a
jail sentence. In this case, the events taken as a totality within the
novel pass judgment on 20th-century Western civilization, measured out
in collective guilt and shame.
“I slept with Marianne, she got
undressed in the bathroom, she had a body, a face to rend your soul and
mine asked for nothing but that, in the scent of the Alexandrian rain
and sea I got drunk on Marianne's fragrances...” Mirković speaks of a
“search of a love, a gaze,” an event that will tear him from the endless
circling, release him from the Wheel, “a meeting, anything to escape
yourself.” At another point, he sees himself in orbit. “I have been
split in two then in the war and crushed like a tiny meteor.”
There's
a good bit of irony here. Mirković yearns for release from the wheel of
Samsara, from the world of illusion. Having been split in two and
crushed by war, suffering from PTSD that he attempts to drown out by
continually plying himself with drugs and booze, he would dearly love to
be made whole. But how? Does he expect his new life with a new woman,
Sashka the artist, to be the answer? According to enlightenment
traditions such as Buddhism, if he truly became serious about effecting a
release from anxiety, craving, hatred, and delusion, he'd go off,
either in isolation or as part of a spiritual community.
"curious
this passion for reading, a remnant from Venice, from Marianne great
devourer of books, a way to forget to disappear wholly into paper,
little by little I replaced adventure novels with simple novels,
Conrad's fault, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness, one title
calls for another, and maybe without really understanding, who knows, I
let myself be carried away, page by page...there is nothing I desire
more than a novel, where the people and characters, a play of masks and
desires, and little by little to forget myself, forget my body at rest
in this chair, forget my apartment building, Paris, life itself as the
paragraphs, dialogues, adventures..."
Many are the references to
writers and literature sprinkled throughout the novel's pages. We're
even given hints that Mirković himself would like to tell his story in
writing. For me, this was surely a most appealing and uplifting part of Zone.
And when I read, “these stories of monsters reminded me of my own
ogres, Serbian, Croatian, who could unleash all their rage and quench
all their thirst for mythic humanity,” I linked the narrator's vivid,
hideous, dreadful images with three novels I've read and reviewed from
the Eastern European Zone: Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić (Bosnia), Absolution by Aleš Šteger (Slovania), and A Handful of Sand by Marinko Košče (Croatia). The underlying message: war and violence are never the answer.
"for
us the collective stems from the story of individual suffering, the
place of the dead, of corpses, it's not Croatia that's bleeding it's the
Croats, our country is where its graves are, our murderers, the
murderers on the other side of the mirror are biding their time, and
they will come, they will come because they have already come, because
we have already gone to cut their ears to a point, put our stakes in
their wives' stomachs and tear out their eyes, a great wave of screaming
blind men will cry for revenge, will come defend their graves and the
bones of their dead..."
Reading passages like this, is it any wonder Zone, like Homer's Illiad,
is divided into 24 bloody chapters and we're given the sense Ares or
Mars, the god of war, continues to reign havoc over the lands within the
Zone. Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised that Mirković reflects, "I
was no longer inside myself I was in the Bardo the waiting room of
wandering souls." True, the narrator is on a train traveling in Odyssey mode rather than actively engaged in Illiad
war mode, but, and this is a critical point, the corpse strewn fields
still fill his mind - in a very real sense, he's the embodiment of the
unending murders, tortures, and war within the Zone.
Mathias Énard has written a propulsive novel, once started, nearly
impossible to put down. It is an erudite and ambitious literary work
articulated in an unforgettable voice. Special thanks to Charlotte
Mandell for her splendid translation. 
Mathias Énard, born 1972 - photo taken around 2008, publication date of Zone, when the French author was 38-years-old
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