"All of Énards books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. Hes the composer of a discomposing age." -- Joshua Cohen - The New York Times Book Review "Énard fuses recollection and scholarly digression into a swirling, hypnotic, stream-of-consciousness narration." -- Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal "In Mathias Enards magnificent new novel, they banish the ghosts by feasting on a grand, Rabelaisian scale.Through a meal that takes in innumerable courses, boisterously parodic speeches and industrial quantities of fermented grape juice, Enard guides the reader through a history of eloquence, which runs from Boethius to Bossuet, and a story of the French palate that leaves no dish unturned." -- Irish Times "There is a capricious divinity at work here, and his name is Énard." -- Jeremy Lybarger - 4columns "The real story becomes history, the fluidity of time, the democratizing powers of death, and through a stew of Buddhist, Christian and Islamic philosophies the cyclical jumble of life. This is Énard at his best..." -- Martin Riker - The New York Times "A feast of pathos and pleasure, and a shimmering argument for the interconnectedness of everything." -- The New Yorker "Cosmic melodysometimes rhapsodic, sometimes dissonant or atonalorchestrates the novel, binding the disparate characters into loose networks of karmic reciprocation and rebirth." -- Dustin Illingworth - The Nation
