A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass, a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey Énards quiet, Bressonian hero endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of TheDeserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.
Dustin Illingworth, New York Times This rich, unsettling novel the eighth by Mathias Énard, and his sixth to be translated into English (once again by Charlotte Mandell) amounts to an interrogation of betrayal. In particular, it explores the complex decisions people are forced to make in the midst of war. This is a moving, elegant and frequently uncomfortable novel about the emotional stakes of difficult choices made amid the most unbearable situations.
Russell Williams, Times Literary Supplement Complex yet rewarding The style is intense, almost overwhelming: at once hyper-detailed and deliberately generalized. We are in an unnamed time and an unnamed place, where everything is immediate and governed by the physical urge to survive. Alternating with this stark account is one as dense and allusive as a Jorge Luis Borges story.
John Self, The Observer [ The Deserters] bears the hallmarks of Enards bric-a-brac erudition and his agility in crossing time periods, cultures and locations. Mandells translation is harmonious throughout it delights in precision without ever seeming fussy.... The Deserters is brimming with interesting ideas as it looks at todays world with a long sightline back through 20th-century history.
Rónán Hession, Irish Times An engrossing study of the struggle to recover ones humanity in the aftermath of extreme violence. Told through interwoven narratives, the novel plays artfully with time and space, gently zeroing in on its central themes and spanning a wide range of human experience. The Deserters is immediately reminiscent of Coetzee: it is sparse, intelligent and hungry for the big moral questions.
Arianne Shahvisi, author of Arguing for a Better World By turns rich in searing detail and sweeping in its intellectual range, The Deserters threads together Europes weighty past with a darker elemental future. Mathias Enard, always masterful, creates a fiercely compelling dual narrative, surprising, glitteringly alive and unforgettable.
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History With an unflinching depiction of civilizations decline and its dystopic aftermath, Enard builds a great work of art from the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future. Its a masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly, starred review Composed of two narrative strands twisting but never crossing around each other, The Deserters is unusual in the way it takes a certain American event 9/11 and places it within the context of other periods of historical rupture. The questions it raises are broad: Does history merely repeat itself, or can cycles be broken? Can we escape history, or are we forever at its mercy? By evoking 9/11 alongside the Yugoslav wars of the nineties and Russias ongoing war against Ukraine, Énard is able to explore the tensions of a seeming contradiction: that a certain era of world history and this includes Americas place within it is over. For good. And yet: how familiar this moment appears, the sound and shape of it. How closely it repeats syllables of the past.
Rhian Sasseen, The Baffler A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europes most challenging authors.
Kirkus I dont know anybody who has quite [ Enards] range.... Exquisitely written.
John Mitchinson, Monocle on Culture Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfect balance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.
Javier Cercas, author of The Impostor Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful stylist to boot. He is one of the great novelists of our time.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins All of Enards 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, New York Times A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.
Christopher Beha, Harpers The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.
Leo Robson, New Statesman
