A second Enard novel. A suitable tome to initiate a new year.
There’s a lot to unpack when reading Enard.
Firstly - what kind of a novel is this? In so far as novels usually depend on plot. Something Enard quite clearly isn’t that interested in. There is a plot in Compass, of a kind. Franz Ritter, the narrator, is lying awake in his Vienna flat, dying, one is informed, probably (although maybe not). He has recently received a document from Sarah, the love of his life, who is in Sarawak. The novel will detail their past history, but in terms of plot development, you can more or less forget it. The novel follows the musings of an insomniac night. At the end of the night, there’s a brief flurry of real-time email exchange between the pair, but nothing is resolved or even destroyed. So, this is a meditative novel. It’s a rumination, as much as a story. It’s also, it feels at times, a wilful counter-novel. It doesn’t want you to be seduced by the novel’s tricks, which are those canny plot twists which keep the reader wanting to turn the page. If that’s what you’re after, Enard appears to be saying, give up now, because you’re not going to get it.
At the same time, this is a love story. A reflexive, poetic love story. The word poetic is used here to clarify the fact that Enard writes about love in the same way as a poet does. A poet rarely sets out to recount the story of the love they are celebrating. The poet sets out to detail the sensations and emotions which the state of love provokes. There might be a narrative to the Sonnets, but the reader doesn’t read the Sonnets for this reason. The Sonnets exist to capture the sensation of love, something poetry by and large achieves more effectively than prose. Because, as they say, love is fleeting, it is about lived moments, rather than a coherent story. One pure moment of love can outweigh a lifetime. Love recalibrates value. Those moments weigh a million times more than all the others. Enard’s book flowers when Franz tells his readership about the moments he and his beloved, Sarah, finally achieved the proximity that he has dreamed of. In Palmyra and Tehran. The lack of any clear plot, the deviations and the anecdotes, so tangential, are eclipsed by these moments of intimacy. Something which lent the ending of the book, for this reader at least, a curious emotional power. We can go round the houses, do our jobs, run our races, but this notion of “love” will always be shadowing us, we will always be awaiting the moment it chooses to seize and twist our dreams once again.
Then again, this is a book which is dedicated to an exploration of the relationship between the Occident and the Orient. In the same way that Zone was centred on the Mediterranean. This is where the text acquires a scholarly dimension, perhaps a didactic one. Both Franz and Sarah, the narrator’s beloved, are fascinated by the way in which the construct of the Orient by Western European artists has shaped the way in which Western European culture has evolved and also how the Orient has been perceived. Allowing the notion of an organisation like Isis to be seen as an Oriental phenomenon, something the novel refutes, saying that Isis is just as anathema to most Middle-Easterners as it is to most Europeans. (For Enard the Orient is circumscribed by an arc that stretches from Istanbul (or Vienna) to Tehran, via Aleppo and Damascus, even if Sarah ends up in Indonesia, and the latter stages of the book engages to a minimal degree with India and Buddhism.) There is a Saidian exegesis of the way in which notions of the Orient, filtered via the accounts of early European visitors, are manifested in the work of many artists including Flaubert, Wagner, Beethoven and a hundred other figures of greater or lesser renown. At the same time, Sarah’s scholarship investigates the circularity of the process, the way in which the Orient has used the Western notions of what it is as a mirror to further define its own cultural identity. The shifting territory of ‘the other’ as they might have said back in the days of my 80s philosophy classes. Enard’s scholarship is dazzling, and clearly a large part of the reason he writes is to try to communicate the subtleties of these relationships, to break down the assumed, trenchant visions of cultural identity, a task which seems even more urgent in these times of phoney cultural warfare.
So, given the varied aspects of this particular novel, here’s a speculative conclusion to the question of Enard’s true novelistic agenda. Enard is a writer whose greatest concern is to maintain the urgency and import of the word, as an agent of communication. Which sounds slightly highfalutin, but isn’t really. In a society where the image has become transcendent, where the capacity of concentration on the word is ebbing, Enard seeks to re-vindicate the power of language as a means of bridging difference. Compass is a paean to this; a great torrent of words which break over the reader in wave after wave, constantly seeming to urge us not to be seduced by the simplicities of narrative, to dig deeper, to assimilate, to love, even to learn….
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