Description

In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at people below while his traumatized mother cowers in their flat. The violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills civilians and combatants indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with her soon threatens to push them all into the abyss. Now appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard’s debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, tracking the convulsions of a brutalized mind in spare, unflinching prose.

Publisher Review

‘Reading Mathias Enard, one doesn’t sense any anxiety about the fate of the novel.’

– Christopher Byrd, New York Review of Books ‘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 Vasquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins ‘All of Enard’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.’

– 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, Harper’s ‘The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.’

– Leo Robson, New Statesman