The Deserters

by Mathias Énard, Charlotte Mandell (Translator)

Overview

From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, an epic, furious novel that shows the dangers of ideology and the aftermath of war

A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness—he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and—pulled together in Mathias Énard’s enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose—time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811239028
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize); The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild; Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants; Zone; and Street of Thieves.
A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, Mandell has translated works by a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/31/2025

This brilliant interlocking diptych from Énard (Compass) begins with a soldier emerging from a battlefield into a nightmarish future. What has become of the world is a mystery, as is the identity of this haunted survivor. The answers may lie in a conference celebrating the work of the late mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, held aboard a cruise ship on the inauspicious date of September 11, 2001. In attendance are theorists and intellectuals, each with their own agenda and ax to grind. Chief among them is Heudeber’s daughter, Irina, who’s there to present a paper on the irrational numbers of Persian mystic Nasir al-Dun Tusi. Irina has an ulterior motive: to pry the secret of her father’s life and suicide from his widow, Maja. What ensues is a fervent collage of letters, arguments, and confessions that spans from Buchenwald and the GDR to the fall of the Soviet Union and the Twin Towers. When Énard returns to the lone soldier, he’s seen scaling an unforgiving rock face on the other side of which he discovers another survivor amid the ruins. With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from “the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.” It’s a masterpiece. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"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—Énard’s 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 The Deserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace."

The New York Times - Dustin Illingsworth

"A novel in counterpoint—Énard explores the role of the sciences in the past century’s horrors, even as he depicts an innate humanity in the bond between the soldier and the woman. In Charlotte Mandell’s translation from the French, the melding of themes is reproduced on the level of the language, which shifts from crisp scholarly exposition to vivid poetic fragments. Synthesizing so many ideas and styles is customary for this brilliant author; his formal skill and provocative intelligence remain well worth the encounter."

The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"All of Énard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age."

The New York Times Book Review - Joshua Cohen

"Two seemingly unconnected narratives—one saturated with history, the other scrubbed of all historical referents—explore themes of trauma and loss in this formally inventive novel… Énard uses their contrasting textures to sometimes unsettling but ultimately revelatory effect."

Booklist - Brendan Driscoll

2025-03-08
Prix Goncourt–winning French author Énard’s short novel maps the stark geometry between the Holocaust and 9/11, ideology and fate, truth and memory.

In 1995, noted East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor, drowned, an apparent suicide. A quarter-century later, his daughter, Irina, muses on his time in the concentration camp, his unshakable devotion to mathematics (“the other name for hope”), and his exploits as an outspoken antifascist and Communist sympathizer. She also flashes back to Sept. 11, 2001, when she and her aged mother, a politically active “orphan of the Revolution,” attended a celebration of her father’s work at a floating conference on a boat outside Berlin. Following the terrorist attacks in America, “the night kept falling,” recalls Irina, “our faith in a kind of peace…crumbling away.” While Irina’s recollections have the immediacy and directness of a diary, the novel’s alternating narrative is told in a kind of purgatorial stream-of-consciousness poetry, voiced by a barely conscious male deserter fleeing an unnamed contemporary war and a rightfully fearful young woman he encounters in the mountains. (She’s accompanied by an injured donkey, the book’s hero.) Énard, whose 500-page novelZone (2010) consisted of a single-sentence monologue, draws eerie meaning from the odd particularities of the natural world: “a luminous puddle stretches out over the rocks, the pebbles, so many reefs on a dazzled sea, strewn with green inlets, something trembles…” Ultimately, the book is haunted by the endless cycle of war and cruelty. “You don’t want the vexations of the past to suffocate you,” says the deserter. How can we avoid that? For Heudeber, it’s all in the numbers.

A powerfully elusive meditation by one of Europe’s most challenging authors.

Kirkus Reviews