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The Deserters
Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend. Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict – in love as in politics – comes to commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell, this latest work from Mathias Enard vividly lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 23, 2023
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2588 people want to read
About the author
Mathias Énard
42 books503 followersMathias Énard 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 Edmée-de-La-Rochefoucauld 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 Décembre.
Compass, which garnered Énard the renowned Prix Goncourt in 2015, traces the intimate connection between Western humanities and art history, and Islamic philosophy and culture. In one sentence that's over 500 pages long, Zone tells of the recent European past as a cascade of consequences of wars and conflicts.
Énard lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the Universitat Autònoma. His latest publications include a poetry collection titled Dernière communication à la société proustienne de Barcelone (Final message to the Proust Society of Barcelona) and Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, a long novel published in 2020.
Compass, which garnered Énard the renowned Prix Goncourt in 2015, traces the intimate connection between Western humanities and art history, and Islamic philosophy and culture. In one sentence that's over 500 pages long, Zone tells of the recent European past as a cascade of consequences of wars and conflicts.
Énard lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the Universitat Autònoma. His latest publications include a poetry collection titled Dernière communication à la société proustienne de Barcelone (Final message to the Proust Society of Barcelona) and Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, a long novel published in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 149 reviews
June 1, 2025
Drawing parallels… The present and the past…
Prisoners of the camps… Fugitives… Exiles… Deserters…
The world was cracked into two parts… So many years have passed but there are still those singed by the war… The daughter of the imprisoned during the wartime mathematician, who is now dead, and her very old mother…
Both the deserter and the mathematician’s daughter face disasters…
Even in peacetime wars don’t leave us in peace.
Prisoners of the camps… Fugitives… Exiles… Deserters…
you stink of blood and shit,
you stink of sleep and hunger,
a child could kill you with one punch,
he counts the days since he left the city. Since his flight from the barracks. Four days since he launched the vehicle into the ravine…
The world was cracked into two parts… So many years have passed but there are still those singed by the war… The daughter of the imprisoned during the wartime mathematician, who is now dead, and her very old mother…
I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.
Both the deserter and the mathematician’s daughter face disasters…
…bodies falling from the windows, towers collapsing, crowds running to escape the impenetrable clouds of dust as if emerging from the gates of hell.
Even in peacetime wars don’t leave us in peace.
February 28, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize
2025 Cercador Prize finalist
Paul defined himself as “an anti-fascist mathematician”. He was as stubborn as an axiom.
The Deserters, translated by Charlotte Mandell (after a one-book Frank Wynne cover period) from Mathias Énard's original is a collection of two novellas.
The English blurb (taken from the French original) refers to the "oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself."
Which is a polite way of saying that the author has written two separate novellas, but rather than publishing them separately has chosen to do so in one volume, and furthermore printed them in interspersed sections. The connection between the two, or indeed the logic of the interspersing, was a mystery to me and I've not really seen an explanation from the author.
The original novella, centered around the figure of Paul Heudeber, a fictional mathematician who survived Buchenwald only to die of drowing (possibly a suicide, possibly an accident) in his mid 70s, manages in its brief length to cover key events in a, very Western centric it must be said, version of the history of the last hundred years, including the Holocaust, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11, Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
From interviews, the invasion of Ukraine seems to have been what prompted the 2nd novella, the story of a man who deserts from a vicious war, and returns to his home area, and a woman, also fleeing the war, he encounters. Although in contrast to the relative historical precision of the first, Enard has chosen a placeless and timeless setting for this part, perhaps an attempt to acknowledge the specificity of the original novella and, by contrast, the more universal experience of war.
The story of Heudeber is well-crafted, Enard carefully inserting him into mathematical history so that, for example, he's a protege of the real-life Emmy Noether.
Heudeber is known for a work he wrote during his internment in Buchenwald, which, after his death is being discussed at a conference in his honour starting on 9th September 2011 and schedule to run on to and past the 11th (cue ominous sounding music):
Paul defended his thesis and obtained his first post at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin just when intellectuals were starting to flee the GDR. The work entitled Ettersberg Conjectures, Mathematical Elegies, was one of the first books published by the Academy's press at the end of 1947. It was comprised of studies Paul Heudeber wrote during his captivity in Buchenwald between 1940 and 1946. Venerated today as a treasure by scientific and literary communities, the Conjectures was reprinted only once in East Germany, in 1973 (in a purely mathematical version, without the poems, the corollaries, the commentaries on camp life) and it wasn't until 1991 that the Akademie Verlag reprinted the original version, augmented by Paul with fragments he himself had left out of the first publication (mainly love poems to Maja written between 1937 and 1947). It's this version, under the title Buchenwald Conjectures, translated into English by Robert Kant in Cambridge, that became known all over the world, the only maths book to have known relative success, so much so that the publishers, who thought this success could be even greater, suggested to Paul that he authorize an exclusively 'literary' version, without the mathematical expositions, which he of course refused until his death.
...
Robert Kant's contribution to the 2001 conference (a contribution he was revising with us during the river journey through Berlin) had to do with the first conjecture, on the circumstances of the birth of this extraordinary project, in the heart of the extreme violence of the concentration camp, and on the way Paul Heudeber launched this imaginary dialogue, from his barracks, with the mathematicians of previous generations: the first conjecture (hence the first chapter) deals with the theorems of David Hilbert; the second is devoted to Paul's famous demonstration of the twin prime conjecture, and so on.
Robert Kant argued that the originality of Paul's text - apart from its inarguably literary quality, its considerations on the Revolution, its obscure passages, its dark poetry - stems from its scientific radicality: from the intersection, in the heart of the twentieth century, of historical despair with mathematical hope.
As per the quote, Énard allows Heudeber to have solved the (still to this day unsolved) Twin Prime Conjecture - Yitang Zhang managing, impressively, to establish only in 2013 the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often, but at 70 million not 2, and various efforts thereafter, including the Polymath Project reducing this to <=246.
At one point we are told that Heudeber’s poems and prose writings in Buchenwald were constrained by the volume of paper available to him, which makes it somewhat unlikely he would have succeeded in setting out a complex and lengthy mathematical proof, one that ultimately required computational techniques. At the risk of suggesting the author should have written a different novel, I can’t help but wonder if an alternative set up might have been that he claimed to have discovered the proof within the camp, and spent the rest of his career trying to reconstruct it.
For the second novella, I think one's reaction to this will depend on one's taste for the prose style. I think as a stand-alone book I'd have relished it, but as interruptions to a tale of pure mathematics, I was less welcoming. This a hail-storm:
She reaches the trunk and leans against it, despite the storm the donkey eats the tough little green leaves on the lowest branches, she's afraid, the clouds are of a limitless black, she is dripping, her scarf, her short hair, her face are covered in tiny rivulets, the water is streaming down her shoulders, slipping between her breasts; her socks are swimming in the muddy torrents that span the tree roots and form miniature rapids, and when the storm is at its height, she thinks, as the darkened horizon is twisted with lightning flashes punctuated by rumblings, the madness of the rain seems to interrupt itself only to return twice as strong; it becomes thick, white, hard, and rebounds against the rocks, a stinging swarm of thousands of insects, the lower part of her legs, between her ankles and the hem of her skirt, is attacked by white hailstones that bounce back wherever they can, adding to the sonorous panic, to the infernal noise of the thunder, it's an army of millions of ice soldiers furiously stomping on the slopes, suddenly the air is freezing, as if smoking with frost - the donkey has started braying again, it's complaining about the hail, it's complaining about this painful mass on its back, it too is seeking the cover of the tree, whose dark branches, thin at the ends, are themselves victims of the hailstones and produce the muffled sound of a semantron struck by hordes of mallets, ice marbles andpiling up against the rocks, in the crevices, on the slightest ledge, and are painting the landscape in a heavy, bluish, transluscent snow which reflects the lightning and produces a morbid light, a sickly, fantastical, phosphoresence.
For me, 4 stars for the Heudeber story, 3 for the deserter section, so 3.5 overall which I'm rounding down as I think I'd have appreciated each more as a stand-alone work.
Booker judges' citation
‘The Deserters weaves together two stories, told in very contrasting voices, exploring themes of commitment and betrayal, hope and survival, during times of war. One story, delivered in a raw unforgiving tone, moves forward in time and follows a man and woman escaping an undefined war. The other, told in more refined language, looks backwards as we join a scientific conference celebrating the life of Paul Heudeber, a mathematician, communist and poet. We were particularly taken in this second strand by the broad engagement with history from the Second World War to 9/11, from the Cold War to the conflicts in Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. The mathematicians among the judges also thought the author pulled off a convincing portrayal of the culture of mathematics.’
2025 Cercador Prize finalist
Paul defined himself as “an anti-fascist mathematician”. He was as stubborn as an axiom.
The Deserters, translated by Charlotte Mandell (after a one-book Frank Wynne cover period) from Mathias Énard's original is a collection of two novellas.
The English blurb (taken from the French original) refers to the "oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself."
Which is a polite way of saying that the author has written two separate novellas, but rather than publishing them separately has chosen to do so in one volume, and furthermore printed them in interspersed sections. The connection between the two, or indeed the logic of the interspersing, was a mystery to me and I've not really seen an explanation from the author.
The original novella, centered around the figure of Paul Heudeber, a fictional mathematician who survived Buchenwald only to die of drowing (possibly a suicide, possibly an accident) in his mid 70s, manages in its brief length to cover key events in a, very Western centric it must be said, version of the history of the last hundred years, including the Holocaust, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11, Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
From interviews, the invasion of Ukraine seems to have been what prompted the 2nd novella, the story of a man who deserts from a vicious war, and returns to his home area, and a woman, also fleeing the war, he encounters. Although in contrast to the relative historical precision of the first, Enard has chosen a placeless and timeless setting for this part, perhaps an attempt to acknowledge the specificity of the original novella and, by contrast, the more universal experience of war.
The story of Heudeber is well-crafted, Enard carefully inserting him into mathematical history so that, for example, he's a protege of the real-life Emmy Noether.
Heudeber is known for a work he wrote during his internment in Buchenwald, which, after his death is being discussed at a conference in his honour starting on 9th September 2011 and schedule to run on to and past the 11th (cue ominous sounding music):
Paul defended his thesis and obtained his first post at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin just when intellectuals were starting to flee the GDR. The work entitled Ettersberg Conjectures, Mathematical Elegies, was one of the first books published by the Academy's press at the end of 1947. It was comprised of studies Paul Heudeber wrote during his captivity in Buchenwald between 1940 and 1946. Venerated today as a treasure by scientific and literary communities, the Conjectures was reprinted only once in East Germany, in 1973 (in a purely mathematical version, without the poems, the corollaries, the commentaries on camp life) and it wasn't until 1991 that the Akademie Verlag reprinted the original version, augmented by Paul with fragments he himself had left out of the first publication (mainly love poems to Maja written between 1937 and 1947). It's this version, under the title Buchenwald Conjectures, translated into English by Robert Kant in Cambridge, that became known all over the world, the only maths book to have known relative success, so much so that the publishers, who thought this success could be even greater, suggested to Paul that he authorize an exclusively 'literary' version, without the mathematical expositions, which he of course refused until his death.
...
Robert Kant's contribution to the 2001 conference (a contribution he was revising with us during the river journey through Berlin) had to do with the first conjecture, on the circumstances of the birth of this extraordinary project, in the heart of the extreme violence of the concentration camp, and on the way Paul Heudeber launched this imaginary dialogue, from his barracks, with the mathematicians of previous generations: the first conjecture (hence the first chapter) deals with the theorems of David Hilbert; the second is devoted to Paul's famous demonstration of the twin prime conjecture, and so on.
Robert Kant argued that the originality of Paul's text - apart from its inarguably literary quality, its considerations on the Revolution, its obscure passages, its dark poetry - stems from its scientific radicality: from the intersection, in the heart of the twentieth century, of historical despair with mathematical hope.
As per the quote, Énard allows Heudeber to have solved the (still to this day unsolved) Twin Prime Conjecture - Yitang Zhang managing, impressively, to establish only in 2013 the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often, but at 70 million not 2, and various efforts thereafter, including the Polymath Project reducing this to <=246.
At one point we are told that Heudeber’s poems and prose writings in Buchenwald were constrained by the volume of paper available to him, which makes it somewhat unlikely he would have succeeded in setting out a complex and lengthy mathematical proof, one that ultimately required computational techniques. At the risk of suggesting the author should have written a different novel, I can’t help but wonder if an alternative set up might have been that he claimed to have discovered the proof within the camp, and spent the rest of his career trying to reconstruct it.
For the second novella, I think one's reaction to this will depend on one's taste for the prose style. I think as a stand-alone book I'd have relished it, but as interruptions to a tale of pure mathematics, I was less welcoming. This a hail-storm:
She reaches the trunk and leans against it, despite the storm the donkey eats the tough little green leaves on the lowest branches, she's afraid, the clouds are of a limitless black, she is dripping, her scarf, her short hair, her face are covered in tiny rivulets, the water is streaming down her shoulders, slipping between her breasts; her socks are swimming in the muddy torrents that span the tree roots and form miniature rapids, and when the storm is at its height, she thinks, as the darkened horizon is twisted with lightning flashes punctuated by rumblings, the madness of the rain seems to interrupt itself only to return twice as strong; it becomes thick, white, hard, and rebounds against the rocks, a stinging swarm of thousands of insects, the lower part of her legs, between her ankles and the hem of her skirt, is attacked by white hailstones that bounce back wherever they can, adding to the sonorous panic, to the infernal noise of the thunder, it's an army of millions of ice soldiers furiously stomping on the slopes, suddenly the air is freezing, as if smoking with frost - the donkey has started braying again, it's complaining about the hail, it's complaining about this painful mass on its back, it too is seeking the cover of the tree, whose dark branches, thin at the ends, are themselves victims of the hailstones and produce the muffled sound of a semantron struck by hordes of mallets, ice marbles andpiling up against the rocks, in the crevices, on the slightest ledge, and are painting the landscape in a heavy, bluish, transluscent snow which reflects the lightning and produces a morbid light, a sickly, fantastical, phosphoresence.
For me, 4 stars for the Heudeber story, 3 for the deserter section, so 3.5 overall which I'm rounding down as I think I'd have appreciated each more as a stand-alone work.
Booker judges' citation
‘The Deserters weaves together two stories, told in very contrasting voices, exploring themes of commitment and betrayal, hope and survival, during times of war. One story, delivered in a raw unforgiving tone, moves forward in time and follows a man and woman escaping an undefined war. The other, told in more refined language, looks backwards as we join a scientific conference celebrating the life of Paul Heudeber, a mathematician, communist and poet. We were particularly taken in this second strand by the broad engagement with history from the Second World War to 9/11, from the Cold War to the conflicts in Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. The mathematicians among the judges also thought the author pulled off a convincing portrayal of the culture of mathematics.’
March 6, 2026
Read #7 of the 2026 International Booker Prize
Perhaps controversial, but of the seven titles I've read, this emerges as my favourite from the International Booker Prize longlist. I found the storytelling style to get in its own way -- I would have preferred having the novellas separated, rather than alternating -- but within each story, the prose kept me glued to the page. I think it may be a 4.5 star with some more reflection, but I'll settle for a 4 star for now.
The Deserters is technically a package of two novellas, and there's a deliberate contrast between the two stories that works incredibly well. One focuses on the aftermath of war and violence, honoring the legacy of a mathematician whose internment in a concentration camp led to some of his most prolific discoveries and inspiration. It references several prolific historical events, ranging from World War II all the way through to the invasion of Ukraine. The other story is entirely anachronistic and focuses on a soldier fleeing an unspecified war and seeking refuge in an unspecified country.
Both novellas deal with the consequences of war from both the personal and societal perspectives. Each focuses on a relationship between a man and a woman, and the lingering trauma that emerges from their proximity to violence. The titular theme of desertion also comes into play to describe both physical exile, but also the desertion from ideologies and political movements. While there's no direct overlap in the entries, the thematic overlap is richly woven through and begging to be analyzed. I don't disagree with some readers finding them 'too' disconnected, but for me it was the perfect amount of subtlety and ambiguity.
The Twin Prime Conjecture is central to one of the novellas, and I think it perfectly encapsulates what Enard was trying to achieve with the combination of these two entries. Enard explores the connection of prime numbers to nature (e.g., the life cycle of cicadas) and highlights their foundational role in mathematics. These two stories could be considered twin primes in themselves -- they speak to entirely different experiences, yet remain in tangible proximity to each other. There are infinite such pairs of stories we could explore that characterize the brutality of war and how universal it is across humanity's existence.
I don't think you need to know anything about math to appreciate this book, but I do think you appreciate it more if you're interested in math or have a background in it. If I hadn't suffered through a Bachelor's and Master's degree in mathematics, I probably would have found myself bored with the numerous mathematical theories and references.
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Perhaps controversial, but of the seven titles I've read, this emerges as my favourite from the International Booker Prize longlist. I found the storytelling style to get in its own way -- I would have preferred having the novellas separated, rather than alternating -- but within each story, the prose kept me glued to the page. I think it may be a 4.5 star with some more reflection, but I'll settle for a 4 star for now.
The Deserters is technically a package of two novellas, and there's a deliberate contrast between the two stories that works incredibly well. One focuses on the aftermath of war and violence, honoring the legacy of a mathematician whose internment in a concentration camp led to some of his most prolific discoveries and inspiration. It references several prolific historical events, ranging from World War II all the way through to the invasion of Ukraine. The other story is entirely anachronistic and focuses on a soldier fleeing an unspecified war and seeking refuge in an unspecified country.
Both novellas deal with the consequences of war from both the personal and societal perspectives. Each focuses on a relationship between a man and a woman, and the lingering trauma that emerges from their proximity to violence. The titular theme of desertion also comes into play to describe both physical exile, but also the desertion from ideologies and political movements. While there's no direct overlap in the entries, the thematic overlap is richly woven through and begging to be analyzed. I don't disagree with some readers finding them 'too' disconnected, but for me it was the perfect amount of subtlety and ambiguity.
The Twin Prime Conjecture is central to one of the novellas, and I think it perfectly encapsulates what Enard was trying to achieve with the combination of these two entries. Enard explores the connection of prime numbers to nature (e.g., the life cycle of cicadas) and highlights their foundational role in mathematics. These two stories could be considered twin primes in themselves -- they speak to entirely different experiences, yet remain in tangible proximity to each other. There are infinite such pairs of stories we could explore that characterize the brutality of war and how universal it is across humanity's existence.
I don't think you need to know anything about math to appreciate this book, but I do think you appreciate it more if you're interested in math or have a background in it. If I hadn't suffered through a Bachelor's and Master's degree in mathematics, I probably would have found myself bored with the numerous mathematical theories and references.
Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer
April 2, 2025
Mathias Enard just fucking rules. His latest book is an unusual novel, made up of two novellas wrapped around eachother, though they never intersect.
There is the tale of a deserter from a brutal unnamed war, stalking the mountains, surviving and aiming for the border. This is interspersed with the life story of the fictional German mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, and his political activist wife Maja, as told by their daughter, Irina.
Irina is looking back from the present day to September 11th, 2001, a day when a memorial for her father on board a boat in Berlin is interrupted by the event that would shape early 20th century discourse.
The two narratives don't come together at all, so we can only assume that's how Enard means it to be. So what are we to take from these stories? To me, it seems to be about the cycles of war, the cycles of human stupidity and the relentless toll it takes on humanity. But it is also a story of survival and relentless adaptation.
Whatever it is, the prose is delicious and lyrical, with so many passages filled with wisdom and wonder and horror. He's a stone cold genius.
There is the tale of a deserter from a brutal unnamed war, stalking the mountains, surviving and aiming for the border. This is interspersed with the life story of the fictional German mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, and his political activist wife Maja, as told by their daughter, Irina.
Irina is looking back from the present day to September 11th, 2001, a day when a memorial for her father on board a boat in Berlin is interrupted by the event that would shape early 20th century discourse.
The two narratives don't come together at all, so we can only assume that's how Enard means it to be. So what are we to take from these stories? To me, it seems to be about the cycles of war, the cycles of human stupidity and the relentless toll it takes on humanity. But it is also a story of survival and relentless adaptation.
Whatever it is, the prose is delicious and lyrical, with so many passages filled with wisdom and wonder and horror. He's a stone cold genius.
April 28, 2025
I just love Énard’s writing, the way he crafts a sentence, the way he weaves those sentences around one another, at once erudite and cinematic, all of it excites me very much.
Here we have two narratives that run parallel throughout the whole book but never intertwine, never coalesce in any obvious way. In one, a soldier deserts an unnamed war and treks across the mountains to his childhood cabin. In the other, the daughter of a once well known German mathematician, a man who survived his internment in Buchenwald by escaping into the world of numbers and who remained loyal to the GDR and the fight for communism until the fall of the Wall, reflects on her father’s life and legacy and the secrets and shadows that haunted her parents' relationship and that remained hidden to her until the end.
Mathias has shared that the fictional biography of the mathematician was the original focus for the novel, but that the start of the war in Ukraine and the resurgence of Russia’s quest for imperial power inspired the addition of the soldier’s story.
One can speculate about how one narrative relates to the other—is the through line hope? The mathematician finds hope in the concentration camp through numbers and his cause, the deserter finds hope in the humanity that slowly comes back to him after the horrors he has committed in the war. Is the common theme the futility of war, the danger of blind loyalty to a cause? The unnamed war the man deserts needs no name because it can be so many. The mathematician is haunted for life by his time in the concentration camp but his loyalty to his own beliefs and cause creates an isolated existence in which he is rarely able to be with his wife and daughter.
Énard’s sentences are poetic and such a joy to read that the absence of easy answers or a clear connection do not matter in the slightest, the thrill is in the beauty of his words.
Here we have two narratives that run parallel throughout the whole book but never intertwine, never coalesce in any obvious way. In one, a soldier deserts an unnamed war and treks across the mountains to his childhood cabin. In the other, the daughter of a once well known German mathematician, a man who survived his internment in Buchenwald by escaping into the world of numbers and who remained loyal to the GDR and the fight for communism until the fall of the Wall, reflects on her father’s life and legacy and the secrets and shadows that haunted her parents' relationship and that remained hidden to her until the end.
Mathias has shared that the fictional biography of the mathematician was the original focus for the novel, but that the start of the war in Ukraine and the resurgence of Russia’s quest for imperial power inspired the addition of the soldier’s story.
One can speculate about how one narrative relates to the other—is the through line hope? The mathematician finds hope in the concentration camp through numbers and his cause, the deserter finds hope in the humanity that slowly comes back to him after the horrors he has committed in the war. Is the common theme the futility of war, the danger of blind loyalty to a cause? The unnamed war the man deserts needs no name because it can be so many. The mathematician is haunted for life by his time in the concentration camp but his loyalty to his own beliefs and cause creates an isolated existence in which he is rarely able to be with his wife and daughter.
Énard’s sentences are poetic and such a joy to read that the absence of easy answers or a clear connection do not matter in the slightest, the thrill is in the beauty of his words.
February 23, 2026
En lo que a mí respecta, no está entre los libros más admirables y recomendables de Mathias Enard. En su obra, sólida y elaborada con sentido y sensatez, sin embargo, junto con las grandes piezas, las joyas de su corona, también conviven este tipo de novelas, que identifico entre las obras de oficio más que obras de inspiración. Otro de sus títulos que también encuentro dentro de esa clasificación es La calle de los ladrones.
Digamos que para quienes hemos leído Remontando el Orinoco la estructura de la narración dual, dividida en dos cursos narrativos, no es extraña, si bien en aquella obra primeriza Enard realizaba una pirueta que conectaba dos hilos en apariencia inconexos, en esta ocasión me parece que emplea ese doble flujo en un juego de contrastes.
En la primera, un soldado abandona a su ejército e inicia una fuga por unos paisajes que le son familiares, que son de su infancia. Sucio, cansado, llega a la antigua cabaña dónde su padre le llevó varias veces mientras se recupera. Por los alrededores aparecerá una mujer (deduzco que joven) que también ha sufrido en sus carnes los horrores de la guerra. En esta trama la prosa es más poética y sensual, convive y contrasta lo sucio con el encanto que produce el paraje natural, en ocasiones la prosa de Enard alcanza gran vuelo poético, un lirismo algo almibarado y sin embargo agradable, que está entre lo más valioso de Desertar.
La segunda rama narrativa se prolonga durante varias décadas. El núcleo central es un matemático comunista llamado Paul Heudeber, quien fue encerrado en Buchenwald y ahí pergeñó una obra genial que combina poesía, confesión autobiográfica y una serie de indagaciones matemáticas que, en los años posteriores, tras su liberación, lo convertirán en una figura remarcable dentro de la intelectualidad de la RDA y de Europa entera. Cómo es habitual en Enard, no falta el amor romántico e idealizado, una suerte de pasión caramelizada, que siempre tiene los mismos ecos y hechuras, da igual que novela agarres, casi en cada novela tiene estos pegotes de lirismo romántico dónde los varones viven una pasión deslumbrante por mujeres ideales, una luz eterna e inextinguible que mueve sus vidas, les sirve de referencia, llena su interior y a mí me parecen siempre un tanto cursis, encima ya digo que todas parecen reescrituras de historias parecidas y por lo tanto, cada vez que aparece, para mí devalúa en parte la lectura, es más, cuanto menos peso tiene esta pasión romántica, mejor suele ser la novela. En el caso de Desertar la pasión es central y arrebatadora a pesar de los años y las distancias, los estructura de forma absoluta.
En esta segunda rama narrativa parte históricamente de la II Guerra Mundial y alcanza el 11 de Septiembre de 2001, teniendo el atentado contra las Torres gemelas un impacto considerable en la narración. A mí la verdad es que todas las páginas que recorren esa velada tampoco me convencieron. A la postre te das cuenta que responden a cierta tesis que parece sostener Enard, la de mostrar a sus creaciones cómo afectadas por los eventos históricos a pesar de no ser protagonistas de éstos. Porque se escoge la fecha del atentado no de forma azarosa, si no porque supuso el catalizador definitivo contra globalización del conflicto occidente vs. islam que protagoniza de forma obsesiva el debate político en tantos países, incluso en los que apenas cuentan con población musulmana. El caso es que Irina, hija de Paul y de Maja, el gran amor de Paul, aparte de matemáticas también estudio lenguas árabes en El Cairo se siente particularmente afectada por este evento y de esa forma encarna a nivel dramático este impacto histórico en los personajes.
Lo que sí me gusta de Enard es que, si bien casi siempre utiliza una serie de comodines dramáticos, que ya he mencionado, luego también sale de su zona de confort y se dedica a indagar e investigar un campo nuevo que se añade al basto corpus intelectual de su obra. Me refiero a que si en Zona hablaba de guerrilleros implicados en la guerra de los Balcanes (conflicto también presente en Desertar), en Brújula abordaba el orientalismo o en El banquete de la cofradía de sepultureros bucea en diferentes fases históricas del sudoeste francés, en Desertar se atreve con los matemáticos y las matemáticas, y de forma bastante razonada, consigue dotar a sus personajes matemáticos de preocupaciones y expresiones que se adaptan a su naturaleza intelectual. Ya he dicho antes que es una novela en la cual se percibe un gran oficio.
A su esmerada prosa, tan musical como modulada, encontramos entonces algunos aspectos atractivos pero ya digo que conviven con pasiones algo empalagosas y ya muy usadas por el autor francés. Puede que a otro lector esto le parezca pertinente y atractivo, no lo descarto, no me parecerá irracional, a mí desde luego no me ha llenado y por su falta de inspiración lo ubicaría entre los libros más flojos de la cada vez más extensa obra de Mathias Enard.
Digamos que para quienes hemos leído Remontando el Orinoco la estructura de la narración dual, dividida en dos cursos narrativos, no es extraña, si bien en aquella obra primeriza Enard realizaba una pirueta que conectaba dos hilos en apariencia inconexos, en esta ocasión me parece que emplea ese doble flujo en un juego de contrastes.
En la primera, un soldado abandona a su ejército e inicia una fuga por unos paisajes que le son familiares, que son de su infancia. Sucio, cansado, llega a la antigua cabaña dónde su padre le llevó varias veces mientras se recupera. Por los alrededores aparecerá una mujer (deduzco que joven) que también ha sufrido en sus carnes los horrores de la guerra. En esta trama la prosa es más poética y sensual, convive y contrasta lo sucio con el encanto que produce el paraje natural, en ocasiones la prosa de Enard alcanza gran vuelo poético, un lirismo algo almibarado y sin embargo agradable, que está entre lo más valioso de Desertar.
La segunda rama narrativa se prolonga durante varias décadas. El núcleo central es un matemático comunista llamado Paul Heudeber, quien fue encerrado en Buchenwald y ahí pergeñó una obra genial que combina poesía, confesión autobiográfica y una serie de indagaciones matemáticas que, en los años posteriores, tras su liberación, lo convertirán en una figura remarcable dentro de la intelectualidad de la RDA y de Europa entera. Cómo es habitual en Enard, no falta el amor romántico e idealizado, una suerte de pasión caramelizada, que siempre tiene los mismos ecos y hechuras, da igual que novela agarres, casi en cada novela tiene estos pegotes de lirismo romántico dónde los varones viven una pasión deslumbrante por mujeres ideales, una luz eterna e inextinguible que mueve sus vidas, les sirve de referencia, llena su interior y a mí me parecen siempre un tanto cursis, encima ya digo que todas parecen reescrituras de historias parecidas y por lo tanto, cada vez que aparece, para mí devalúa en parte la lectura, es más, cuanto menos peso tiene esta pasión romántica, mejor suele ser la novela. En el caso de Desertar la pasión es central y arrebatadora a pesar de los años y las distancias, los estructura de forma absoluta.
En esta segunda rama narrativa parte históricamente de la II Guerra Mundial y alcanza el 11 de Septiembre de 2001, teniendo el atentado contra las Torres gemelas un impacto considerable en la narración. A mí la verdad es que todas las páginas que recorren esa velada tampoco me convencieron. A la postre te das cuenta que responden a cierta tesis que parece sostener Enard, la de mostrar a sus creaciones cómo afectadas por los eventos históricos a pesar de no ser protagonistas de éstos. Porque se escoge la fecha del atentado no de forma azarosa, si no porque supuso el catalizador definitivo contra globalización del conflicto occidente vs. islam que protagoniza de forma obsesiva el debate político en tantos países, incluso en los que apenas cuentan con población musulmana. El caso es que Irina, hija de Paul y de Maja, el gran amor de Paul, aparte de matemáticas también estudio lenguas árabes en El Cairo se siente particularmente afectada por este evento y de esa forma encarna a nivel dramático este impacto histórico en los personajes.
Lo que sí me gusta de Enard es que, si bien casi siempre utiliza una serie de comodines dramáticos, que ya he mencionado, luego también sale de su zona de confort y se dedica a indagar e investigar un campo nuevo que se añade al basto corpus intelectual de su obra. Me refiero a que si en Zona hablaba de guerrilleros implicados en la guerra de los Balcanes (conflicto también presente en Desertar), en Brújula abordaba el orientalismo o en El banquete de la cofradía de sepultureros bucea en diferentes fases históricas del sudoeste francés, en Desertar se atreve con los matemáticos y las matemáticas, y de forma bastante razonada, consigue dotar a sus personajes matemáticos de preocupaciones y expresiones que se adaptan a su naturaleza intelectual. Ya he dicho antes que es una novela en la cual se percibe un gran oficio.
A su esmerada prosa, tan musical como modulada, encontramos entonces algunos aspectos atractivos pero ya digo que conviven con pasiones algo empalagosas y ya muy usadas por el autor francés. Puede que a otro lector esto le parezca pertinente y atractivo, no lo descarto, no me parecerá irracional, a mí desde luego no me ha llenado y por su falta de inspiración lo ubicaría entre los libros más flojos de la cada vez más extensa obra de Mathias Enard.
March 1, 2026
Now Longlisted for the International Booker
3,5
Mathias Énard always picks fascinating subjects and does something original with them. Here it is war, loyalty, betrayal and their reverberations in time.
The novel consists of two, very distinct narratives told in alternating chapters.
First, there is a deserting soldier escaping an unnamed war in an unnamed Mediterranean country. He is alone in the wilderness, exposed to the elements (and here the nature writing is really good), trying to survive and not get caught. Then he encounters a woman with a donkey, equally on the run but from the other side.
Second, we have the very different story of the commemoration of a brilliant East-German mathematician Paul Heudeber, on a boat outside Berlin on 10 September 2001. A convinced communist and concentration camp survivor, Paul has stayed true to his ideals, staying behind in the GDR. But there are question marks surrounding his death and his relationship with a West-German politician.
Sometimes Énard wants to show off his erudition a bit too much. With the two very different narratives he can demonstrate a love for nature as well as for the most abstract of sciences.
His keenest interest is history though and I believe that is the lens through which we are supposed to read this novel. History repeating itself, the ever presence of war and conflicting ideals leading to violence. Although there are clear common themes and parallels can be drawn between the two strands, I am in need of more analysis to understand the overall logic of bringing them together in one novel.
4 for the writing, 3 for the concept.
3,5
Mathias Énard always picks fascinating subjects and does something original with them. Here it is war, loyalty, betrayal and their reverberations in time.
The novel consists of two, very distinct narratives told in alternating chapters.
First, there is a deserting soldier escaping an unnamed war in an unnamed Mediterranean country. He is alone in the wilderness, exposed to the elements (and here the nature writing is really good), trying to survive and not get caught. Then he encounters a woman with a donkey, equally on the run but from the other side.
Second, we have the very different story of the commemoration of a brilliant East-German mathematician Paul Heudeber, on a boat outside Berlin on 10 September 2001. A convinced communist and concentration camp survivor, Paul has stayed true to his ideals, staying behind in the GDR. But there are question marks surrounding his death and his relationship with a West-German politician.
Sometimes Énard wants to show off his erudition a bit too much. With the two very different narratives he can demonstrate a love for nature as well as for the most abstract of sciences.
His keenest interest is history though and I believe that is the lens through which we are supposed to read this novel. History repeating itself, the ever presence of war and conflicting ideals leading to violence. Although there are clear common themes and parallels can be drawn between the two strands, I am in need of more analysis to understand the overall logic of bringing them together in one novel.
4 for the writing, 3 for the concept.
March 3, 2026
Longlist Book 2
i read this book thinking it would be about war in the general sense, the external shock of violence. but what stayed with me, far more, is how war reshapes who we are inside of ourselves. it’s not spectacle. it’s erosion, habits, the new normals that feel terrifying because they become familiar.
at around 219 pages, the deserters could have been a really impactful novel if only it was just one story. so basically this book has two separate novellas.
novella one, follows an unnamed soldier trying to survive. there’s no rhetoric about honor. no cinematic framing. just hunger, mud, fear, and the constant calculation of how to stay alive one more day. what unsettled me most was how quickly the abnormal becomes routine. the things that would once have horrified you become procedural. necessary. survival strips everything down to instinct.
while the second novella follows paul, maja, and irina (mainly Paul and Irina though) people shaped by history rather than active battlefields. paul survived a concentration camp, and that history hums quietly through everything. here, war isn’t immediate danger. it’s residue. it’s what lingers in the body decades later. it’s how history refuses to stay in the past. this section is more reflective, more philosophical. and this is where the book started to lose me. not because the ideas aren’t interesting. they are. but they feel distanced. abstracted and at times, i felt like i was reading about ideas rather than people. the emotional core never fully pierced through.
and for a novel about war and survival, it felt oddly distant.
i read this book thinking it would be about war in the general sense, the external shock of violence. but what stayed with me, far more, is how war reshapes who we are inside of ourselves. it’s not spectacle. it’s erosion, habits, the new normals that feel terrifying because they become familiar.
at around 219 pages, the deserters could have been a really impactful novel if only it was just one story. so basically this book has two separate novellas.
novella one, follows an unnamed soldier trying to survive. there’s no rhetoric about honor. no cinematic framing. just hunger, mud, fear, and the constant calculation of how to stay alive one more day. what unsettled me most was how quickly the abnormal becomes routine. the things that would once have horrified you become procedural. necessary. survival strips everything down to instinct.
while the second novella follows paul, maja, and irina (mainly Paul and Irina though) people shaped by history rather than active battlefields. paul survived a concentration camp, and that history hums quietly through everything. here, war isn’t immediate danger. it’s residue. it’s what lingers in the body decades later. it’s how history refuses to stay in the past. this section is more reflective, more philosophical. and this is where the book started to lose me. not because the ideas aren’t interesting. they are. but they feel distanced. abstracted and at times, i felt like i was reading about ideas rather than people. the emotional core never fully pierced through.
and for a novel about war and survival, it felt oddly distant.
February 3, 2026
Anche il cielo piange sangue (cit. lamento funebre iraniano)
Si può subire il fascino di una parola? A me è successo con il verbo disertare, derivante dal latino desertare (abbandonare), che dà il titolo all'opera di Énard.
Se mi avessero chiesto, prima della lettura di questo libro, quale immagine mi evocasse il verbo disertare, mi sarei limitata a rispondere: quella di un soldato in fuga dal campo di battaglia.
E se inoltre mi avessero chiesto di pensare a un significato più ampio del verbo, tutt'al più avrei risposto che diserta chi abdica ai propri doveri sociali o morali.
Ecco, ho scoperto che per Énard questo è solo il punto di partenza e che la parola in questione può assumere una valenza più ampia e anche più profonda.
La riflessione che ho fatto, leggendo i due racconti che costituiscono l'opera, è che, a volte, ad essere tradita, abbandonata, lasciata indietro è una parte di noi. Altre volte si tratta di una promessa che ci eravamo fatti e che non abbiamo coltivato. E credo sia anche in questa accezione che Énard ci parla di diserzione.
Le due storie che costituiscono l'opera sono come rette parellele. Diversi i protagonisti, diversa la cornice. Diverso anche lo stile adottato dall'autore (più poetico nella prima, almeno secondo il mio sentire, più complesso e articolato nella seconda).
Énard le racconta a capitoli alternati, forse per consentire al lettore di percepire una certa assonanza o quantomeno il richiamo dei temi che hanno in comune: la guerra, la solitudine, la disperazione.
Il primo racconto è quello che ho amato di più. E' la storia di un milite ignoto, in fuga da una guerra non meglio definita, con addosso un carico di brutture, inflitte e subite.
All'inizio del racconto, come detto, mi ero fatta l'idea che la diserzione dovesse essere intesa come abdicazione ai doveri di soldato.
Eppure, proseguendo nella lettura, mi è venuto da pensare che invero il soldato, con l'inizio della guerra, abbia disertato a se stesso e al proprio sentire. Solo nel momento in cui si allontanerà dal campo di battaglia e si rifugerà tra i monti, nella baita in cui è cresciuto, il protagonista si riapproprierà gradualmente della propria umanità.
E' proprio a quell'umanità e quella capacità di sentire che aveva abdicato.
Ci sono altri protagonisti in questa storia ma non voglio svelare nulla se non che uno è ritratto in controluce sulla prima di copertina. E' l'unico protagonista dei due racconti che non diserterà, comunque vogliate intendere la parola.
La seconda storia è quella di un geniale matematico, sopravvissuto al campo di concentramento di Buchenwald, sostenitore della Ddr, dove sceglierà di vivere. La sua è una storia d'amore per i numeri e la scienza, per la compagna e la figlia e, non da ultimo, per i propri convincimenti, per le proprie difficili scelte.
Anche in questo racconto ci sono diversi protagonisti e quasi tutti in qualche modo tradiranno qualcosa o qualcuno.
E a proposito di tradimenti, segnalo che il racconto del matematico racchiude in poche pagine anche la storia di un grande scienziato persiano del secolo XIII, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Racconta Énard, esperto di storia e lingua araba e persiana, che fu proprio al-Tusi ad accompagnare i mongoli fino a Baghdad. Scrive Énard:
Baghdad della Casa della Sapienza e delle biblioteche, Baghdad delle Mille e una notte, Baghdad del pensiero, della poesia, del sapere, Baghdad che era stata il faro del mondo per cinquecento anni e fu perduta, distrutta dai mongoli di Hulagu all'inizio di febbraio del 1258.
Chi lo leggerà troverà, tra il narrato e il non detto, tanti collegamenti con la storia più recente, dal 2001 ad oggi.
Si può subire il fascino di una parola? A me è successo con il verbo disertare, derivante dal latino desertare (abbandonare), che dà il titolo all'opera di Énard.
Se mi avessero chiesto, prima della lettura di questo libro, quale immagine mi evocasse il verbo disertare, mi sarei limitata a rispondere: quella di un soldato in fuga dal campo di battaglia.
E se inoltre mi avessero chiesto di pensare a un significato più ampio del verbo, tutt'al più avrei risposto che diserta chi abdica ai propri doveri sociali o morali.
Ecco, ho scoperto che per Énard questo è solo il punto di partenza e che la parola in questione può assumere una valenza più ampia e anche più profonda.
La riflessione che ho fatto, leggendo i due racconti che costituiscono l'opera, è che, a volte, ad essere tradita, abbandonata, lasciata indietro è una parte di noi. Altre volte si tratta di una promessa che ci eravamo fatti e che non abbiamo coltivato. E credo sia anche in questa accezione che Énard ci parla di diserzione.
Le due storie che costituiscono l'opera sono come rette parellele. Diversi i protagonisti, diversa la cornice. Diverso anche lo stile adottato dall'autore (più poetico nella prima, almeno secondo il mio sentire, più complesso e articolato nella seconda).
Énard le racconta a capitoli alternati, forse per consentire al lettore di percepire una certa assonanza o quantomeno il richiamo dei temi che hanno in comune: la guerra, la solitudine, la disperazione.
Il primo racconto è quello che ho amato di più. E' la storia di un milite ignoto, in fuga da una guerra non meglio definita, con addosso un carico di brutture, inflitte e subite.
All'inizio del racconto, come detto, mi ero fatta l'idea che la diserzione dovesse essere intesa come abdicazione ai doveri di soldato.
Eppure, proseguendo nella lettura, mi è venuto da pensare che invero il soldato, con l'inizio della guerra, abbia disertato a se stesso e al proprio sentire. Solo nel momento in cui si allontanerà dal campo di battaglia e si rifugerà tra i monti, nella baita in cui è cresciuto, il protagonista si riapproprierà gradualmente della propria umanità.
E' proprio a quell'umanità e quella capacità di sentire che aveva abdicato.
Ci sono altri protagonisti in questa storia ma non voglio svelare nulla se non che uno è ritratto in controluce sulla prima di copertina. E' l'unico protagonista dei due racconti che non diserterà, comunque vogliate intendere la parola.
La seconda storia è quella di un geniale matematico, sopravvissuto al campo di concentramento di Buchenwald, sostenitore della Ddr, dove sceglierà di vivere. La sua è una storia d'amore per i numeri e la scienza, per la compagna e la figlia e, non da ultimo, per i propri convincimenti, per le proprie difficili scelte.
Anche in questo racconto ci sono diversi protagonisti e quasi tutti in qualche modo tradiranno qualcosa o qualcuno.
E a proposito di tradimenti, segnalo che il racconto del matematico racchiude in poche pagine anche la storia di un grande scienziato persiano del secolo XIII, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Racconta Énard, esperto di storia e lingua araba e persiana, che fu proprio al-Tusi ad accompagnare i mongoli fino a Baghdad. Scrive Énard:
Baghdad della Casa della Sapienza e delle biblioteche, Baghdad delle Mille e una notte, Baghdad del pensiero, della poesia, del sapere, Baghdad che era stata il faro del mondo per cinquecento anni e fu perduta, distrutta dai mongoli di Hulagu all'inizio di febbraio del 1258.
Chi lo leggerà troverà, tra il narrato e il non detto, tanti collegamenti con la storia più recente, dal 2001 ad oggi.
June 13, 2025
This novel consist of two seemingly unrelated, alternating stories. One is about a deserter in an unidentified war, presumably somewhere in the Mediterranean, and his attempt to escape the country. Another is about Irina Heudeber and her family, her father Paul (mathematician, survivor of Buchenwald, devout East German communist) and her mother, who became a West German politician. There is much focus on memory and the interrelation of past and present, favorite themes of Énard. I found the story of the literal deserter and his war somewhat tedious, although it is an effective portrayal of the dehumanizing effects of war. The story of the Heudebers was more interesting, to me at least. To explain the plural of the title would give away too much. The writing, even in translation, is superb.
February 28, 2026
If there’s one thing this novel gets right it’s that the prose is always luminous; maybe too perfected to the point of distraction. I digress.
I don’t really know what to make of this book. There’s two simultaneous stories going on. It’s quite possible that the author wrote two separate novellas and then just chopped them up into interspersed sections in order to pass off as one complete piece. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, but I wouldn’t doubt it because…
I struggled to make a connection between the two narratives. They are not interconnected, there is no discernible link. Perhaps there is more a thematic link, but what is that exactly? The cyclical nature of war? Okay, is there more? Maybe I need to adjust my thinking cap. Maybe this quote is the point behind the novel: the crux holding it up.
“She confided in me, in the midst of her endless elucubrations between Spandau and Wannsee, how happy she was that the twentieth century was over; how happy she was to see Europe progressing and how ardently she wished the twenty-first century would never experience the horrors of the preceding century”
Maybe, this book wants to reinforce that history is doomed to keep on repeating itself. We strive to make progress, but we fall right back onto our base instincts. We don’t learn from trauma.
The two stories were interesting on their own although they also had their shortcomings: the deserter story is compelling although repetitive; the mathematician story is fascinating, yet occasionally tedious (the latter is the stronger story). I’ve been dying to read this author, so I’m thrilled that I finally got to dip my toes in his work, and it further intrigues my curiosity. Hopefully, my next visit will be much more satisfying.
I don’t really know what to make of this book. There’s two simultaneous stories going on. It’s quite possible that the author wrote two separate novellas and then just chopped them up into interspersed sections in order to pass off as one complete piece. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, but I wouldn’t doubt it because…
I struggled to make a connection between the two narratives. They are not interconnected, there is no discernible link. Perhaps there is more a thematic link, but what is that exactly? The cyclical nature of war? Okay, is there more? Maybe I need to adjust my thinking cap. Maybe this quote is the point behind the novel: the crux holding it up.
“She confided in me, in the midst of her endless elucubrations between Spandau and Wannsee, how happy she was that the twentieth century was over; how happy she was to see Europe progressing and how ardently she wished the twenty-first century would never experience the horrors of the preceding century”
Maybe, this book wants to reinforce that history is doomed to keep on repeating itself. We strive to make progress, but we fall right back onto our base instincts. We don’t learn from trauma.
The two stories were interesting on their own although they also had their shortcomings: the deserter story is compelling although repetitive; the mathematician story is fascinating, yet occasionally tedious (the latter is the stronger story). I’ve been dying to read this author, so I’m thrilled that I finally got to dip my toes in his work, and it further intrigues my curiosity. Hopefully, my next visit will be much more satisfying.
February 26, 2026
9/10
Complex and technical.
The Deserters doesn’t want to make it easy for you to understand its story.
Gradually the threads make sense, even if the connections of the characters don’t.
Quite a meta conversation on war, that I will need a second read to really understand.
Since I’ve committed to re reading the shortlist, I almost look forward to taking this journey again (if it is successful)
Complex and technical.
The Deserters doesn’t want to make it easy for you to understand its story.
Gradually the threads make sense, even if the connections of the characters don’t.
Quite a meta conversation on war, that I will need a second read to really understand.
Since I’ve committed to re reading the shortlist, I almost look forward to taking this journey again (if it is successful)
August 26, 2025
Libro "particolare" nel formato.
Due storie intrecciate tra loro: la biografia del matematico immaginario Paul Heudeber, prima prigioniero del campo di Buchenwald e poi convinto comunista nella Germania dell'Est e quella di un anonimo soldato, disertore di una guerra non specificata, in un paese del Mediterraneo che viene facile identificare con il Sud dei Balcani.
La prima storia è raccontata in maniera spezzettata e indiretta, tramite lettere di Heudeber, tramite i racconti di lui che ne fanno la compagna di una vita Maja (ma compagna a distanza, in quanto esponente politica della Germania Ovest), i colleghi Thiele, Pawley, Kant, Baza. Sejdic, e la figlia Irina.
La seconda storia è raccontata in uno stile lirico, che passa senza soluzione di continuità tra un discorso indiretto, la prima persona del protagonista e quella della donna che incontra, nel suo rifugio nel bosco, e con cui intreccia un complicato rapporto di reciproca paura.
Le due storie non si incontrano mai e spetta a noi capire perché questo libro sia un unico libro. Legati dal tema del disertare, è spontaneo pensare: è questa la congettura che Enard ci lascia da risolvere (così come Heudeber, famoso, appunto, per un testo contenente più congetture che dimostrazioni).
Disertare è anche abbandonare e tradire. Questo libro, in effetti, è colmo di abbandoni e di tradimenti (che non svelo per evitare spoiler). Anche il ruolo della matematica, legata costantemente nel testo alla poesia, credo io, ha molto a che fare con il disertare. E' disertare la complessità del mondo il rifugiarsi nella matematica o nella poesia, ma la diserzione è spesso l'unico modo non violento per sfuggire al dolore, alla cattiveria della storia, alla lotta per il potere. Ma i disertori sono sempre in fuga, vengono costantemente riacciuffati, dalla grande Storia (l'11 Settembre) o da un incontro casuale. Disertare non è, sembra dirci l'autore, mai una strategia vincente, anche se a volte è l'unica strategia possibile.
E' un libro che lascia molti spunti su cui meditare, pur non essendo in alcun modo un libro a tema. Ma è un libro, per me, complessivamente irrisolto. Diversamente da tanti non ho amato la scrittura "poetica" dei capitoli del disertore, né la struttura del libro. Mi è sembrato un lavoro in cui a un certo punto l'autore si sia accontentato della vaghezza, invece di costruire qualcosa di più incisivo, profondo, non dico chiaro ma certo in cui alcuni spunti fossero esplicitati in maniera più nitida.
Per il mio giudizio un libro da tre stelle. La quarta se la merita per il modo estremamente raffinato in cui ha trattato la mia disciplina, costruendo personaggi e scenari abbastanza plausibili (chissà se le "congetture di Buchenwald" sono ispirate alla "Topologia Algebrica in prigionia" di Leray?). Anche la figura di Emmy Noether ne esce, per quanto secondaria, abbastanza limpida (anche se al lettore non informato non sarà chiaro che si tratta di una persona reale e non immaginaria).
Secondo me un'opera minore di un grande autore. Ma potrei anche essere troppo stupido io per averci capito qualche cosa.
Due storie intrecciate tra loro: la biografia del matematico immaginario Paul Heudeber, prima prigioniero del campo di Buchenwald e poi convinto comunista nella Germania dell'Est e quella di un anonimo soldato, disertore di una guerra non specificata, in un paese del Mediterraneo che viene facile identificare con il Sud dei Balcani.
La prima storia è raccontata in maniera spezzettata e indiretta, tramite lettere di Heudeber, tramite i racconti di lui che ne fanno la compagna di una vita Maja (ma compagna a distanza, in quanto esponente politica della Germania Ovest), i colleghi Thiele, Pawley, Kant, Baza. Sejdic, e la figlia Irina.
La seconda storia è raccontata in uno stile lirico, che passa senza soluzione di continuità tra un discorso indiretto, la prima persona del protagonista e quella della donna che incontra, nel suo rifugio nel bosco, e con cui intreccia un complicato rapporto di reciproca paura.
Le due storie non si incontrano mai e spetta a noi capire perché questo libro sia un unico libro. Legati dal tema del disertare, è spontaneo pensare: è questa la congettura che Enard ci lascia da risolvere (così come Heudeber, famoso, appunto, per un testo contenente più congetture che dimostrazioni).
Disertare è anche abbandonare e tradire. Questo libro, in effetti, è colmo di abbandoni e di tradimenti (che non svelo per evitare spoiler). Anche il ruolo della matematica, legata costantemente nel testo alla poesia, credo io, ha molto a che fare con il disertare. E' disertare la complessità del mondo il rifugiarsi nella matematica o nella poesia, ma la diserzione è spesso l'unico modo non violento per sfuggire al dolore, alla cattiveria della storia, alla lotta per il potere. Ma i disertori sono sempre in fuga, vengono costantemente riacciuffati, dalla grande Storia (l'11 Settembre) o da un incontro casuale. Disertare non è, sembra dirci l'autore, mai una strategia vincente, anche se a volte è l'unica strategia possibile.
E' un libro che lascia molti spunti su cui meditare, pur non essendo in alcun modo un libro a tema. Ma è un libro, per me, complessivamente irrisolto. Diversamente da tanti non ho amato la scrittura "poetica" dei capitoli del disertore, né la struttura del libro. Mi è sembrato un lavoro in cui a un certo punto l'autore si sia accontentato della vaghezza, invece di costruire qualcosa di più incisivo, profondo, non dico chiaro ma certo in cui alcuni spunti fossero esplicitati in maniera più nitida.
Per il mio giudizio un libro da tre stelle. La quarta se la merita per il modo estremamente raffinato in cui ha trattato la mia disciplina, costruendo personaggi e scenari abbastanza plausibili (chissà se le "congetture di Buchenwald" sono ispirate alla "Topologia Algebrica in prigionia" di Leray?). Anche la figura di Emmy Noether ne esce, per quanto secondaria, abbastanza limpida (anche se al lettore non informato non sarà chiaro che si tratta di una persona reale e non immaginaria).
Secondo me un'opera minore di un grande autore. Ma potrei anche essere troppo stupido io per averci capito qualche cosa.
February 10, 2026
Mathias Enard is definitely one of my top authors and The Deserters continues my admiration of him.
The book is divided into two narratives: the first one is about a soldier who escapes his troupe and wanders in a small village - there he comes across a woman and her donkey. Perceptions are challenged and that’s all I say.
The second narrative is a sort of fragmented biography of the fictional deceased mathematician Paul Heudeber taken from the point of view of his daughter. This includes a love story, Buchenwald, the Berlin Wall and a posthumous conference.
Thematically Enard links both stories . Both characters are deserters but there’s also love , survival , deception and surprises.
Charlotte Mendell’s translation brings out the fluidity of Enard’s prose creating a brilliant and awe inspiring read. It’s a great introduction to Enard as a master craftsman. Highly recommended.
The book is divided into two narratives: the first one is about a soldier who escapes his troupe and wanders in a small village - there he comes across a woman and her donkey. Perceptions are challenged and that’s all I say.
The second narrative is a sort of fragmented biography of the fictional deceased mathematician Paul Heudeber taken from the point of view of his daughter. This includes a love story, Buchenwald, the Berlin Wall and a posthumous conference.
Thematically Enard links both stories . Both characters are deserters but there’s also love , survival , deception and surprises.
Charlotte Mendell’s translation brings out the fluidity of Enard’s prose creating a brilliant and awe inspiring read. It’s a great introduction to Enard as a master craftsman. Highly recommended.
July 7, 2025
Generally compelling but never blew me away in any way really. I kept waiting for the soldier/woman plot to get interesting, or specific, but as an author obsessed with historical reference I think this anonymity is a bit limiting for Enard
March 2, 2026
1900-tallet - århundret som hadde alle muligheter. Og som vi skusla bort med å drepe hverandre. Er det rart at folk deserterer, at de forlater det de en gang trodde på?
Boka åpner med to opplagte desertører, en soldat som har flykta fra krigen på Balkan på 90-tallet (kanskje) som møter en kvinne som har flykta fra landsbyen sin hvor hun blei behandla som et svin av naboene, sendt naken gjennom byen, barbert for håret, voldtatt, kanskje med barn.
Den parallelle historien handler om historikeren Irinas far og mor, matematikeren og den aldri-tvilende kommunisten Paul, og politikeren Maja. Som levde på hver sin side av muren som delte Europa i mange år - som også blei desertører på sine måter.
Boka minner om Orbital av Samantha Harvey, bortsett fra litt mer lokal siden det dreier seg om (!) Europa, USA, Midtøsten og Nord-Afrika. Som en astronaut sitter historikeren Irina og ser 1900-tallet på avstand. Det begynte jo så bra, med
I løpet av de første kapitlene er Europas krigsskueplass på 1900-tallet presentert, Potsdam, Berlin, Wannsee, Steglitz, Paris, Aachen, Brussel - på tross av at historien skrives under pandemien.
Da jeg leste at Énard også var poet var ikke det noen overraskelse for meg. Språket - og oversettelsen - en en fryd for språknerder som meg. Det andre kapitlet lekte med spry, Spree og green som gjentatt.
Eller hva med dette bildet:
Eller seinere i boka, først kapitlet om 11.9.01, som i det parallelle kapitlet om soldaten og den navnløse, unge kvinnen, om lynet som slår ned i et tre:
Jeg vil anbefale alle som er glad i historisk-fiksjon denne boka. En udiskutabel 5 av meg.
Boka er en av tretten bøker som er langlista til Booker International 2026, og jeg håper både at den går videre til kortlista i mars, og så langt er det også den beste boka jeg har lest så jeg håper den vinner.
Jeg kjøpte den som e-bok.
Boka åpner med to opplagte desertører, en soldat som har flykta fra krigen på Balkan på 90-tallet (kanskje) som møter en kvinne som har flykta fra landsbyen sin hvor hun blei behandla som et svin av naboene, sendt naken gjennom byen, barbert for håret, voldtatt, kanskje med barn.
Den parallelle historien handler om historikeren Irinas far og mor, matematikeren og den aldri-tvilende kommunisten Paul, og politikeren Maja. Som levde på hver sin side av muren som delte Europa i mange år - som også blei desertører på sine måter.
Boka minner om Orbital av Samantha Harvey, bortsett fra litt mer lokal siden det dreier seg om (!) Europa, USA, Midtøsten og Nord-Afrika. Som en astronaut sitter historikeren Irina og ser 1900-tallet på avstand. Det begynte jo så bra, med
The Paris Congress opened the twentieth center up to scientific hope [...]og så endte det så dårlig, med teknikken, flyene som blei brukt som bomber i USA.
I løpet av de første kapitlene er Europas krigsskueplass på 1900-tallet presentert, Potsdam, Berlin, Wannsee, Steglitz, Paris, Aachen, Brussel - på tross av at historien skrives under pandemien.
all the crevices, the lines and borders boil with blood they're torrents, rivers with forgotten floods that suddenly carry death along, the tree that seperated us from our neighbour is filled with death ...
Da jeg leste at Énard også var poet var ikke det noen overraskelse for meg. Språket - og oversettelsen - en en fryd for språknerder som meg. Det andre kapitlet lekte med spry, Spree og green som gjentatt.
Eller hva med dette bildet:
... sometimes sleep comes by surprise like the bullet of a marksman lying in ambush.Så presist, så treffende for scenen i boka.
Eller seinere i boka, først kapitlet om 11.9.01, som i det parallelle kapitlet om soldaten og den navnløse, unge kvinnen, om lynet som slår ned i et tre:
it was neither a bomb, nor a shell, she'd never seen the power of lightning, she opens her eyes on a tree burning, broken open and overrun with flames like shivers in which the rain, which has redoubled, is smoking.
Jeg vil anbefale alle som er glad i historisk-fiksjon denne boka. En udiskutabel 5 av meg.
Boka er en av tretten bøker som er langlista til Booker International 2026, og jeg håper både at den går videre til kortlista i mars, og så langt er det også den beste boka jeg har lest så jeg håper den vinner.
Jeg kjøpte den som e-bok.
March 8, 2026
This was one of the most frustratingly horrible reading experiences I've ever had.
Knotty, over-written prose, unnecessary detail over action. Almost nothing happens.
A sensible person would have DNF'ed.
In the final quarter, I did get the point - this book is an illustration of the depths of human misery buried in history and caused by war.
Was it worth the effort? No.
Here we have two intertwined novellas / novellettes. A commemorative conference on a boat, and a soldier fleeing an unnamed war. Usually when there are dual narratives, I'm more invested in one than the other.
In this case, it was more like they were competing to see which could bore the pants off me the most.
I disliked the chewy writing style, the meandering focus. In the boat storyline we are pounded with names and details before we are given any reason to care. In the soldier storyline we have an unoriginal escape plot with excessive nature description.
As the book went on I became more interested in the mathematicians and their background, although the writing is still stiff and formal in a way that made me feel like I was reading conference materials.
By the final quarter though, I think I got it. This book is about the extent of suffering, caused by war in its neverending cycles, in its refusal to learn, in humanities cruelest moments (always doomed to repeat), the way that trauma is buried in history, that women's bodies are violated in the animalistic bloodlust, that people take what they can for themselves in times or war...
The war isn't named because it could be any war.
This is a book that makes you feel like there is nothing to cling to. I hated every minute of it.
Some of the writing is lyrical and elegaic, but it was also rambling and tedious. It took almost three quarters of the book for me to care about any of it, and it left me feeling pessimistic, scooped out, and in need of some light-hearted fluff to remedy the misery.
Draining and dismal, but very much brings home what we all know, but don't always emotionally understand: War is Hell.
Knotty, over-written prose, unnecessary detail over action. Almost nothing happens.
A sensible person would have DNF'ed.
In the final quarter, I did get the point - this book is an illustration of the depths of human misery buried in history and caused by war.
Was it worth the effort? No.
Here we have two intertwined novellas / novellettes. A commemorative conference on a boat, and a soldier fleeing an unnamed war. Usually when there are dual narratives, I'm more invested in one than the other.
In this case, it was more like they were competing to see which could bore the pants off me the most.
I disliked the chewy writing style, the meandering focus. In the boat storyline we are pounded with names and details before we are given any reason to care. In the soldier storyline we have an unoriginal escape plot with excessive nature description.
As the book went on I became more interested in the mathematicians and their background, although the writing is still stiff and formal in a way that made me feel like I was reading conference materials.
By the final quarter though, I think I got it. This book is about the extent of suffering, caused by war in its neverending cycles, in its refusal to learn, in humanities cruelest moments (always doomed to repeat), the way that trauma is buried in history, that women's bodies are violated in the animalistic bloodlust, that people take what they can for themselves in times or war...
The war isn't named because it could be any war.
This is a book that makes you feel like there is nothing to cling to. I hated every minute of it.
Some of the writing is lyrical and elegaic, but it was also rambling and tedious. It took almost three quarters of the book for me to care about any of it, and it left me feeling pessimistic, scooped out, and in need of some light-hearted fluff to remedy the misery.
Draining and dismal, but very much brings home what we all know, but don't always emotionally understand: War is Hell.
November 14, 2025
Shadows are overtaking everything, the lower part of the walls are already in darkness,
I'll curl up in the dark until I disappear, and when daylight comes they ll already be gone,
she knows that's not what will happen,
there is no star in the sky and she senses that these voices that are combining are combining against her, that no one is on her side, that her side does not exist, if she wasn't wounded she could have tried to flee, descend the long steep path with the taste of abyss and sweat,
my heart, it is echoing its machine-gun beat through the whole mountain my mouth is dry, I'm cold, ever since the beginning of the war I've been cold, months and months of cold, I'll leave for the north to escape the freezing cold of the sea, of the city, of the country, the women who were with me that day didn't want to leave, they paid, they said, they paid with their bodies and their shame they paid they can stay, stay shorn, stay raped, stay soiled, stay in the stable, in the intense cold of the stable, the absolute cold of war that will last for years to come, at night, in everyone's sleep, torturers and tortured,
[207]
October 3, 2023
Mathias Enard écrivait une biographie romancée sur un mathématicien fictif lorsque la guerre en Ukraine éclate. Déserter naît de cette situation, un choc qui vient conclure un siècle, le précédent, fait d'utopies ratées, de rêves fous toujours présents mais complètement détachés de la réalité maintenant vécue.
Maïa Scharnhorst est une femme politique de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest, toujours soupçonnée d'intelligence avec l'ennemi, celui de la RDA. Elle est morte en 2005 à 87 ans. Paul Heudeber est celui qui l'a tant aimée, même de l'autre côté du mur, à Berlin. Mathématicien renommé, il est communiste fervent et encarté depuis 1967 et antifasciste notoire. L'année 2021 avec son confinement et sa guerre proche pousse leur fille à raconter.
Irène a gardé le goût de l'histoire notamment lorsque son père racontait l'exposition universelle. Et, comme il était ce mathématicien apprécié, elle est devenue spécialiste de l'histoire des mathématiques. À partir de lettres, de poèmes, de films, elle retrace la vie de ce père énigmatique qui, communiste convaincu, a fui ses croyances politiques devant les réalités. Mais surtout, Paul est l'archétype de l'homme du XXeme siècle. Il a traversé Buchenwald qu'il s'interdisait de nommer ainsi, avant il y eut le camp de Gurs rassemblant entre autres “les indésirables ” fuyant les nazis.
Alors, naturellement, elle raconte l'hommage pour son père auquel sa mère a assisté. Lors de la conférence croisière organisée en 2001, les intervenants ont célébré l'institut de mathématiques qu'il avait créé en 1961. Seulement, nous sommes en septembre…
Le roman de Mathias Enard évolue parallèlement avec deux histoires : le soldat déserteur avec cette femme aux cheveux ras, et cette fille Irène qui part à la redécouverte de ses deux parents.
À aucun moment, les deux histoires ne se rencontrent. Leur point commun est la fuite. Celle du groupe de référence pour tenter d'oublier les morts, leurs regards interrogateurs qui reviennent, tant, la nuit. Mais aussi, la fuite de nos espoirs, idéaux qui ont enchanté notre présent, dont la croyance s'est effacée au fur et à mesure que des charniers se sont dévoilés mais aussi devant l'amour devenu mirage.
Jusqu'à la destruction du Mur, l'idéal socialisme de Paul, comme Mathias Enard le démontre, pouvait faire écran à la réalité. À partir des guerres de Yougoslavie, puis du fameux 11 septembre, la foi d'un monde diffèrent s'est effritée et les illusions se sont envolées, ne laissant que l'imaginaire pansait les esprits. Cette désertion décrite par Mathias Enard est à l'image du soldat déserteur, un lieu de solitude intense où le membre influent devient paria et où il ne reste que l'imaginaire pour se raccrocher à nos rêves et suivre notre humanité.
Le récit de ce soldat, tentant d'échapper aux cauchemars des exactions qu'il a organisés, retrouve grâce aux lieux de l'enfance sa propre compassion.
Mathias Enard écrit avec limpidité même si ses histoires révèlent des degrés de compréhension imbriqués. Mélangeant la langue de la narration à celle du tutoiement puis celle de la mémoire, Déserter étonne par la justesse de son propos, l'érudition dont il s'entoure et la poésie humaniste qu'il transmet.
Difficile de ne pas le découvrir !
Chronique illustrée ici
https://vagabondageautourdesoi.com/20...
Maïa Scharnhorst est une femme politique de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest, toujours soupçonnée d'intelligence avec l'ennemi, celui de la RDA. Elle est morte en 2005 à 87 ans. Paul Heudeber est celui qui l'a tant aimée, même de l'autre côté du mur, à Berlin. Mathématicien renommé, il est communiste fervent et encarté depuis 1967 et antifasciste notoire. L'année 2021 avec son confinement et sa guerre proche pousse leur fille à raconter.
Irène a gardé le goût de l'histoire notamment lorsque son père racontait l'exposition universelle. Et, comme il était ce mathématicien apprécié, elle est devenue spécialiste de l'histoire des mathématiques. À partir de lettres, de poèmes, de films, elle retrace la vie de ce père énigmatique qui, communiste convaincu, a fui ses croyances politiques devant les réalités. Mais surtout, Paul est l'archétype de l'homme du XXeme siècle. Il a traversé Buchenwald qu'il s'interdisait de nommer ainsi, avant il y eut le camp de Gurs rassemblant entre autres “les indésirables ” fuyant les nazis.
Alors, naturellement, elle raconte l'hommage pour son père auquel sa mère a assisté. Lors de la conférence croisière organisée en 2001, les intervenants ont célébré l'institut de mathématiques qu'il avait créé en 1961. Seulement, nous sommes en septembre…
Le roman de Mathias Enard évolue parallèlement avec deux histoires : le soldat déserteur avec cette femme aux cheveux ras, et cette fille Irène qui part à la redécouverte de ses deux parents.
À aucun moment, les deux histoires ne se rencontrent. Leur point commun est la fuite. Celle du groupe de référence pour tenter d'oublier les morts, leurs regards interrogateurs qui reviennent, tant, la nuit. Mais aussi, la fuite de nos espoirs, idéaux qui ont enchanté notre présent, dont la croyance s'est effacée au fur et à mesure que des charniers se sont dévoilés mais aussi devant l'amour devenu mirage.
Jusqu'à la destruction du Mur, l'idéal socialisme de Paul, comme Mathias Enard le démontre, pouvait faire écran à la réalité. À partir des guerres de Yougoslavie, puis du fameux 11 septembre, la foi d'un monde diffèrent s'est effritée et les illusions se sont envolées, ne laissant que l'imaginaire pansait les esprits. Cette désertion décrite par Mathias Enard est à l'image du soldat déserteur, un lieu de solitude intense où le membre influent devient paria et où il ne reste que l'imaginaire pour se raccrocher à nos rêves et suivre notre humanité.
Le récit de ce soldat, tentant d'échapper aux cauchemars des exactions qu'il a organisés, retrouve grâce aux lieux de l'enfance sa propre compassion.
Mathias Enard écrit avec limpidité même si ses histoires révèlent des degrés de compréhension imbriqués. Mélangeant la langue de la narration à celle du tutoiement puis celle de la mémoire, Déserter étonne par la justesse de son propos, l'érudition dont il s'entoure et la poésie humaniste qu'il transmet.
Difficile de ne pas le découvrir !
Chronique illustrée ici
https://vagabondageautourdesoi.com/20...
May 12, 2024
Ich habe mir lange Zeit schwer getan mit diesem, mir von meiner Buchhändlerin empfohlenen, Roman. Immer wieder versuchte ich die zwei unzusammenhängenden Erzählstränge des Buches zusammen zu bringen, was aber scheinbar nicht möglich ist, vielleicht auf einer mir sich nicht erschliessenden Metaebene
Sei’s drum, die Geschichte des Deserteurs, der versucht sich mit seiner Gefangenen? Geisel? durchzuschlagen, verletzt zuletzt, der versucht seine Schuld an der Teilnahme an einem Gemetzel (und die Frau in seiner „Gewalt“ war eines der Opfer) zu bewältigen ist höchst spannend beschrieben.
Und auch die Geschichte um den Mathematiker Heuberger hat ihren Reiz.
Sei’s drum, die Geschichte des Deserteurs, der versucht sich mit seiner Gefangenen? Geisel? durchzuschlagen, verletzt zuletzt, der versucht seine Schuld an der Teilnahme an einem Gemetzel (und die Frau in seiner „Gewalt“ war eines der Opfer) zu bewältigen ist höchst spannend beschrieben.
Und auch die Geschichte um den Mathematiker Heuberger hat ihren Reiz.
February 26, 2026
The Deserters
Transportive sentences, yes, vivid scenery, absolutely. Innovative structure. Interesting switching from first and second person I appreciated. There’s a hypnotic sense to the prose that, in spite of its lush detail that should have been right up my alley, I just simply did not like reading. Can it be that simple?
“you are hungry, you are always hungry, nothing can satisfy you anymore, not oranges, not almonds cracked on the threshold with a stone, not the little fowl, you rediscover hunger the way you rediscover fear, it is life returning and with it despondency, my God, make nature bigger, my God, give us immensity, the languid safety of immensity, stars for nights of war.” (Page 119)
“I'm lying on my stomach, I'm thirsty, I'm in pain, I'm thirsty,she moves an arm, she moves an arm, she moves,” (134)
There is definitely something interesting about the connections across time and space Enard draws here: from soldiers’ desertion of long abandoned wars, returning home to find smaller and equally dangerous conflicts; to the mathematicians’ gathering on the evening of September 10, 2001. —
Structurally: Two independent towering narratives, each standing, and each with its own disaster. After one hits, hindsight for us lets us know that the second story is about to get a hit as well. We’re talking about the big triggers for war and the small escapes from it, all in a book structurally resembling the events of 9/11/2001. That’s honestly a very brilliant set up for the book.
The narrative goes on to involve the discussion of mathematicians and physicists who’ve detailed the destruction of Baghdad a century earlier, connected in material to those gathering on the eve of yet another of Baghdad’s destructions. The author’s compression of history to glean literary meaning is sharp and insightful.
There is something here a bit off about the characterization of Paul, the main mathematician at hand, I never could put my finger on. A line from the middle of the book in a letter he writes:
“everything weighs on me, these days. Work.Solitude. Even maths weighs on me. The students. We've opened a new area of research in statistics and computation, I know nothing about it and that irritates me. I've always hated calculations, and the people who do them even more.”
Later on:
“There's only one thing I'm looking forward to: finding you again, my love. I pass the time as I can, I try to think about series of prime numbers, I think I can demonstrate by analysis an intuition that Euler had, about the relationship between the series of fractions of prime numbers and the harmonic series (forgive me, I'll explain, the harmonic series is the sum of the fractions of natural whole numbers, 1 + ½ + 3 + 14, etc. We know that both diverge and that - at least this is Euler's intuition - the first is like the logarithm of the second. Demonstrating this by analysis is arduous, to put it mildly).”
Further there are letters he writes, LONG letters that are some of the most irritating purple prose I’ve ever encountered.
There’s also just a quality of his thoughts that just always felt flat—I never could get him to open up and feel alive. (a quality of mathematicians?? 😅 😂)
Overall, this book is bold but maybe not bold enough. It’s smart, but maybe too subtle in the spots it should have really shone. The prose might be someone’s cup of tea, but man. I just didn’t like it.
Transportive sentences, yes, vivid scenery, absolutely. Innovative structure. Interesting switching from first and second person I appreciated. There’s a hypnotic sense to the prose that, in spite of its lush detail that should have been right up my alley, I just simply did not like reading. Can it be that simple?
“you are hungry, you are always hungry, nothing can satisfy you anymore, not oranges, not almonds cracked on the threshold with a stone, not the little fowl, you rediscover hunger the way you rediscover fear, it is life returning and with it despondency, my God, make nature bigger, my God, give us immensity, the languid safety of immensity, stars for nights of war.” (Page 119)
“I'm lying on my stomach, I'm thirsty, I'm in pain, I'm thirsty,she moves an arm, she moves an arm, she moves,” (134)
There is definitely something interesting about the connections across time and space Enard draws here: from soldiers’ desertion of long abandoned wars, returning home to find smaller and equally dangerous conflicts; to the mathematicians’ gathering on the evening of September 10, 2001. —
Structurally: Two independent towering narratives, each standing, and each with its own disaster. After one hits, hindsight for us lets us know that the second story is about to get a hit as well. We’re talking about the big triggers for war and the small escapes from it, all in a book structurally resembling the events of 9/11/2001. That’s honestly a very brilliant set up for the book.
The narrative goes on to involve the discussion of mathematicians and physicists who’ve detailed the destruction of Baghdad a century earlier, connected in material to those gathering on the eve of yet another of Baghdad’s destructions. The author’s compression of history to glean literary meaning is sharp and insightful.
There is something here a bit off about the characterization of Paul, the main mathematician at hand, I never could put my finger on. A line from the middle of the book in a letter he writes:
“everything weighs on me, these days. Work.Solitude. Even maths weighs on me. The students. We've opened a new area of research in statistics and computation, I know nothing about it and that irritates me. I've always hated calculations, and the people who do them even more.”
Later on:
“There's only one thing I'm looking forward to: finding you again, my love. I pass the time as I can, I try to think about series of prime numbers, I think I can demonstrate by analysis an intuition that Euler had, about the relationship between the series of fractions of prime numbers and the harmonic series (forgive me, I'll explain, the harmonic series is the sum of the fractions of natural whole numbers, 1 + ½ + 3 + 14, etc. We know that both diverge and that - at least this is Euler's intuition - the first is like the logarithm of the second. Demonstrating this by analysis is arduous, to put it mildly).”
Further there are letters he writes, LONG letters that are some of the most irritating purple prose I’ve ever encountered.
There’s also just a quality of his thoughts that just always felt flat—I never could get him to open up and feel alive. (a quality of mathematicians?? 😅 😂)
Overall, this book is bold but maybe not bold enough. It’s smart, but maybe too subtle in the spots it should have really shone. The prose might be someone’s cup of tea, but man. I just didn’t like it.
March 12, 2026
This novel interweaves two narratives linked by the idea of desertion. One follows an unnamed soldier, possibly a German, who abandons a brutal late stage Second World War front and wanders through his past and a ruined landscape, ultimately forming a bond with a woman, also unnamed, that he cares for and rescues. His is a flight from violence and the atrocities of war and toward compassion. The second narrative focuses on Paul, a renowned East German mathematician, poet and committed communist who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. His history is told by his daughter Irena, and also details the complicated relationship he had with her mother, Maja, a West German politician and activist. Her parents met while resisting the Nazis. Despite their acknowledged love for each other, they end up by circumstances and choice living on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall. Paul’s pursuit of order through mathematics and an ideal communist ideological utopia ultimately led to an existential desertion, an intellectual and emotional retreat.
The writing style in the two stories varies significantly. The soldier story is intimate, raw, emotionally charged and fragmented reflecting the frantic nature of escape. Paul’s story is more distanced with essayistic reflections on mathematics, philosophy and cultural realities, all in contrast to the violent disorder of history. Enard also injects contemporary conflicts into the novel to remind us that there is a broader continuum of violence that persists and we are not as distanced as we would like to believe.
The abrupt alternation between the two stories is obviously a deliberate structural choice made by Enard. The relationship is thematic and we are forced as readers to consider the different forms abandonment can take. We are moved from the immediacy of survival and lived catastrophe to one of reflection on historical trauma. The disruption mirrors the way history continues to intrude into our present. We are continually pulled away from one world into another reflecting the various acts of desertion that the characters display. We are asked to actively construct meaning between to two narratives rather than passively following a continuous story.
The writing style in the two stories varies significantly. The soldier story is intimate, raw, emotionally charged and fragmented reflecting the frantic nature of escape. Paul’s story is more distanced with essayistic reflections on mathematics, philosophy and cultural realities, all in contrast to the violent disorder of history. Enard also injects contemporary conflicts into the novel to remind us that there is a broader continuum of violence that persists and we are not as distanced as we would like to believe.
The abrupt alternation between the two stories is obviously a deliberate structural choice made by Enard. The relationship is thematic and we are forced as readers to consider the different forms abandonment can take. We are moved from the immediacy of survival and lived catastrophe to one of reflection on historical trauma. The disruption mirrors the way history continues to intrude into our present. We are continually pulled away from one world into another reflecting the various acts of desertion that the characters display. We are asked to actively construct meaning between to two narratives rather than passively following a continuous story.
December 30, 2025
I can’t sum up this book in a way that’s any different from the blurb. It’s about everything that can happen in love and war. I definitely need to shorten my reviews but I think I should probably explain it a little incase people want to read it.
This book has two thematically connected storylines - although I kinda have an inkling that they’re directly connected to each other through one of the characters - that flit between each other.
The first is about a soldier who has deserted from the Balkan wars and is trying to find his way to the border. He happens across a woman of a different ethnic group from his community, who is also fleeing and her donkey. This plotline is mainly about their individual relationships to each other and their experiences of the war and their escape from it.
The other plotline is from the perspective of a woman called Irina Scharnhorst, who is ruminating on the relationship of her father, Paul Heudeber who was a (fictional) titanic 20th century Mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, ardent communist and a resident of East Germany, and her mother Maya Scharnhorst, a leading politician in west Germany. Mainly it’s about her dad. This takes place c. 2022-23 but also in 2001, on a river boat during a memorial conference for her father, that coincided with 9/11.
Enard’s prose is really good, it has a really great feel and it’s easy to read. The way he describes the senses and memory (within the deserter storyline in particular) really brought me into the book. Sometimes he used the first person in a way that his writing was like stage commands for me to think as the character in that moment, if that makes any sense. Also I really liked the pacing, although I wish there was a little bit more of the deserter storyline. The way Enard portrayed the donkey was very sweet and really perked the book up at times.
I’d give this a 4.5. It’s a brilliant and sad book.
Thankyou Bibi for the advanced review copy 🫢🙌
This book has two thematically connected storylines - although I kinda have an inkling that they’re directly connected to each other through one of the characters - that flit between each other.
The first is about a soldier who has deserted from the Balkan wars and is trying to find his way to the border. He happens across a woman of a different ethnic group from his community, who is also fleeing and her donkey. This plotline is mainly about their individual relationships to each other and their experiences of the war and their escape from it.
The other plotline is from the perspective of a woman called Irina Scharnhorst, who is ruminating on the relationship of her father, Paul Heudeber who was a (fictional) titanic 20th century Mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, ardent communist and a resident of East Germany, and her mother Maya Scharnhorst, a leading politician in west Germany. Mainly it’s about her dad. This takes place c. 2022-23 but also in 2001, on a river boat during a memorial conference for her father, that coincided with 9/11.
Enard’s prose is really good, it has a really great feel and it’s easy to read. The way he describes the senses and memory (within the deserter storyline in particular) really brought me into the book. Sometimes he used the first person in a way that his writing was like stage commands for me to think as the character in that moment, if that makes any sense. Also I really liked the pacing, although I wish there was a little bit more of the deserter storyline. The way Enard portrayed the donkey was very sweet and really perked the book up at times.
I’d give this a 4.5. It’s a brilliant and sad book.
Thankyou Bibi for the advanced review copy 🫢🙌
October 6, 2025
Masterful.
March 15, 2026
un bon roman, quoique légèrement imprécis. Le mythe de la Pax Europa mis à nu ; stylistiquement, cela m'a beaucoup rappelé Antunes.
Want to read
March 17, 2025Incipit
Ha posato l’arma e fatica a togliersi gli scarponi che con il loro odore (escrementi, sudore rancido) fanno più pesante la stanchezza.
Continua su IncipitMania
Ha posato l’arma e fatica a togliersi gli scarponi che con il loro odore (escrementi, sudore rancido) fanno più pesante la stanchezza.
Continua su IncipitMania
February 1, 2026
Have mixed views on this author, but ultimately found this book to be quite mid. I like how he writes and I do think he is a very talented author but this story didn’t grab me. There were sections of it that were better than others but I was craving more from the book by the finish.
Read
March 8, 2026Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize
"And I pressed against their cool cheeks my cheek which now knew nothing but the kiss of the rifle butt."
—Francis Jammes, Five Prayers for Wartime
*
Betrayal begins with the body, (3)
*
Maja had just celebrated her eighty-third birthday.
Maja drank liters of tea.
Maja was cheerful and sad and silent and talkative.
We all knew she had nothing to do there, on board the Beethoven for a math conference; we all knew she was indispensable to it. (7)
*
Sunday, September 1, 1968
Maja Maja Maja
Let's take away the possessive: love stripped bare.
It grew in absence and night: the lack of you is a source. A body, a ring-you are the seal of all things, unique. Your distance brings the infinite close. You alone allow me to hide myself from time, from evil, from the tides of melancholy. I wonder what there was of my youth, when I hear its cries.
I block my ears with clever calculations. (8)
*
I can't wait for you to come back.
I'll make some concessions; I'll visit you in the West.
I've read your beautiful text, in that horrible journal, on the Prague affair.
I miss our clashes. (8)
*
From that dinner, at the White Owl inn in Wannsee facing Peacock Island on September 10, 2001, two images have lingered:
—Maja's earrings, teardrop-shaped pendants, spar-kle. The candle's yellow flame flickers in its holder.
The tablecloth is red and white. Maja's hair is the color of the candlestick, pewter-gray. The gray pewter contrasts with the strawberry-red lipstick Maja overdid.
—Linden Pawley furtively looks at Maja, with great tenderness. I can sense a kind of veneration in that gaze, a submissive veneration I hadn't known he felt.
As soon as he senses he is being observed, he turns away from Maja and stares into the distance, at a painting on the restaurant wall. (40)
*
Maja abandoned me for her political career just as she herself had been abandoned.
For a long time I felt an anger toward her that verged on silent hatred. (53)
*
In a documentary about women in mathematics filmed a few months before Paul's death, when he is asked what he learned from Emmy Noether, my father (burgundy wool vest, velvet jacket, white mustache), after rather a long pause, facing the cam-era, replies in the high, slightly timid voice of people who aren't used to being filmed: Everything—but especially to be generous, to be interested in other people. (74)
[…]
What did she teach you? Then Paul assumes his serious look, the serious look that with him often hides an ironic answer, which in this instance is not: She taught me that mathematics was the other name for hope. (75)
*
[…] since I'd turned fifty, I'd been struggling with images of death. I imagined I was going to die soon.
My father's so-sudden end haunted me. My solitude, even though I had chosen it myself and accepted it, was an immense echo chamber for my sadness, where melancholy resounded, amplified until it became profound unhappiness. (94)
*
Maja your absence is not just a lack—it's causing the most intimate kind of tension, a void that deforms the world around it. Time, taste, the curves of light, the trajectories of thought everything is transformed by your absence; sometimes I walk, overcome with an aimless energy; often I stay expressionless, motionless, letting night fall around me and leaving my work table (where I've done nothing but look out the window) to go to bed, without a sound, without saying a word. Every morning the daylight returns to remind me—to remind me of what? (99)
[…]
But never mind. Since you are everywhere, I don't need you anymore, my love lives without its object.
Even better: it has become its object, which is you, which is the world. (100)
*
you must leave,
but leaving and abandoning her even with a pot of orange juice is killing her, you should have killed her twice already, fate is showing you the error of your ways,
or not, fate is whispering to you that one must
persevere,
save what you've saved and save yourself, so powerful is the strength of this morning, this Lord you cannot look in the face. (122)
*
I wasn't thinking of Paul, but I was pursuing his powerful mathematical thinking in the arms of the woman he loved. Paul was a sad genius. Dreamers like Paul, constructors of immense dreams, are always sad. Our world is not made for them. (151)
=============
really truly enjoyed this one! solid four stars (& more) for me, & this long list is INCREDIBLY strong. cheers for translation!!
=============
what the judges said:
The Deserters weaves together two stories, told in very contrasting voices, exploring themes of commitment and betrayal, hope and survival, during times of war. One story, delivered in a raw unforgiving tone, moves forward in time and follows a man and woman escaping an undefined war. The other, told in more refined language, looks backwards as we join a scientific conference celebrating the life of Paul Heudeber, a mathematician, communist and poet. We were particularly taken in this second strand by the broad engagement with history from the Second World War to 9/11, from the Cold War to the conflicts in Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. The mathematicians among the judges also thought the author pulled off a convincing portrayal of the culture of mathematics.
about the author:
Mathias Énard, born in 1972 in Niort, France, studied Persian and Arabic and has spent long periods in the Middle East.
He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Choix Goncourt de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves.
For Compass, he won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for 2017’s International Booker Prize, with a translation by Charlotte Mandell.
Énard’s 11th novel, The Deserters, also translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
about the translator:
Born in Connecticut, Charlotte Mandell has translated over 50 books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French.
Her translations include works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2017 and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose.
She was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
=============
2026 International Booker Longlist: In-Progress Rankings
—The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje (tr. David McKay)
—The Director, Daniel Kehlmann (tr. Ross Benjamin)
—She Who Remains, Rene Karabash (tr. Izidora Angel)
—Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur (tr. Faridoun Farrokh)
—The Deserters, Mathias Enard (tr. Charlotte Mandell)
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Shida Bazyar (tr. Ruth Martin)
—The Wax Child, Olga Ravn (tr. Martin Aitken)
12. Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zĩ (tr. Lin King)
13. We Are Green & Trembling, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (tr. Robin Myers)
[10/13 & up next: The Duke, Matteo Melchiore (tr. Antonella Lettieri) — en route!]
"And I pressed against their cool cheeks my cheek which now knew nothing but the kiss of the rifle butt."
—Francis Jammes, Five Prayers for Wartime
*
Betrayal begins with the body, (3)
*
Maja had just celebrated her eighty-third birthday.
Maja drank liters of tea.
Maja was cheerful and sad and silent and talkative.
We all knew she had nothing to do there, on board the Beethoven for a math conference; we all knew she was indispensable to it. (7)
*
Sunday, September 1, 1968
Maja Maja Maja
Let's take away the possessive: love stripped bare.
It grew in absence and night: the lack of you is a source. A body, a ring-you are the seal of all things, unique. Your distance brings the infinite close. You alone allow me to hide myself from time, from evil, from the tides of melancholy. I wonder what there was of my youth, when I hear its cries.
I block my ears with clever calculations. (8)
*
I can't wait for you to come back.
I'll make some concessions; I'll visit you in the West.
I've read your beautiful text, in that horrible journal, on the Prague affair.
I miss our clashes. (8)
*
From that dinner, at the White Owl inn in Wannsee facing Peacock Island on September 10, 2001, two images have lingered:
—Maja's earrings, teardrop-shaped pendants, spar-kle. The candle's yellow flame flickers in its holder.
The tablecloth is red and white. Maja's hair is the color of the candlestick, pewter-gray. The gray pewter contrasts with the strawberry-red lipstick Maja overdid.
—Linden Pawley furtively looks at Maja, with great tenderness. I can sense a kind of veneration in that gaze, a submissive veneration I hadn't known he felt.
As soon as he senses he is being observed, he turns away from Maja and stares into the distance, at a painting on the restaurant wall. (40)
*
Maja abandoned me for her political career just as she herself had been abandoned.
For a long time I felt an anger toward her that verged on silent hatred. (53)
*
In a documentary about women in mathematics filmed a few months before Paul's death, when he is asked what he learned from Emmy Noether, my father (burgundy wool vest, velvet jacket, white mustache), after rather a long pause, facing the cam-era, replies in the high, slightly timid voice of people who aren't used to being filmed: Everything—but especially to be generous, to be interested in other people. (74)
[…]
What did she teach you? Then Paul assumes his serious look, the serious look that with him often hides an ironic answer, which in this instance is not: She taught me that mathematics was the other name for hope. (75)
*
[…] since I'd turned fifty, I'd been struggling with images of death. I imagined I was going to die soon.
My father's so-sudden end haunted me. My solitude, even though I had chosen it myself and accepted it, was an immense echo chamber for my sadness, where melancholy resounded, amplified until it became profound unhappiness. (94)
*
Maja your absence is not just a lack—it's causing the most intimate kind of tension, a void that deforms the world around it. Time, taste, the curves of light, the trajectories of thought everything is transformed by your absence; sometimes I walk, overcome with an aimless energy; often I stay expressionless, motionless, letting night fall around me and leaving my work table (where I've done nothing but look out the window) to go to bed, without a sound, without saying a word. Every morning the daylight returns to remind me—to remind me of what? (99)
[…]
But never mind. Since you are everywhere, I don't need you anymore, my love lives without its object.
Even better: it has become its object, which is you, which is the world. (100)
*
you must leave,
but leaving and abandoning her even with a pot of orange juice is killing her, you should have killed her twice already, fate is showing you the error of your ways,
or not, fate is whispering to you that one must
persevere,
save what you've saved and save yourself, so powerful is the strength of this morning, this Lord you cannot look in the face. (122)
*
I wasn't thinking of Paul, but I was pursuing his powerful mathematical thinking in the arms of the woman he loved. Paul was a sad genius. Dreamers like Paul, constructors of immense dreams, are always sad. Our world is not made for them. (151)
=============
really truly enjoyed this one! solid four stars (& more) for me, & this long list is INCREDIBLY strong. cheers for translation!!
=============
what the judges said:
The Deserters weaves together two stories, told in very contrasting voices, exploring themes of commitment and betrayal, hope and survival, during times of war. One story, delivered in a raw unforgiving tone, moves forward in time and follows a man and woman escaping an undefined war. The other, told in more refined language, looks backwards as we join a scientific conference celebrating the life of Paul Heudeber, a mathematician, communist and poet. We were particularly taken in this second strand by the broad engagement with history from the Second World War to 9/11, from the Cold War to the conflicts in Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. The mathematicians among the judges also thought the author pulled off a convincing portrayal of the culture of mathematics.
about the author:
Mathias Énard, born in 1972 in Niort, France, studied Persian and Arabic and has spent long periods in the Middle East.
He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Choix Goncourt de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves.
For Compass, he won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for 2017’s International Booker Prize, with a translation by Charlotte Mandell.
Énard’s 11th novel, The Deserters, also translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
about the translator:
Born in Connecticut, Charlotte Mandell has translated over 50 books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French.
Her translations include works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2017 and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose.
She was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
=============
2026 International Booker Longlist: In-Progress Rankings
—The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje (tr. David McKay)
—The Director, Daniel Kehlmann (tr. Ross Benjamin)
—She Who Remains, Rene Karabash (tr. Izidora Angel)
—Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur (tr. Faridoun Farrokh)
—The Deserters, Mathias Enard (tr. Charlotte Mandell)
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Shida Bazyar (tr. Ruth Martin)
—The Wax Child, Olga Ravn (tr. Martin Aitken)
12. Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zĩ (tr. Lin King)
13. We Are Green & Trembling, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (tr. Robin Myers)
[10/13 & up next: The Duke, Matteo Melchiore (tr. Antonella Lettieri) — en route!]
September 26, 2023
Déserter, une idéologie, une guerre?
December 5, 2024
4 1/2 *
Displaying 1 - 30 of 149 reviews