Déserter par Mathias Enard (review)

Reviewed by: Déserter par Mathias Enard Philippe Brand Enard, Mathias. Déserter. Actes Sud, 2023. ISBN 978-2-330-18161-1. Pp. 256. An anonymous soldier flees an unnamed war, seeking refuge in the mountains of an unspecified Mediterranean country after deserting from his troops. Intertwined with his story, alternating chapters are narrated by a historian of mathematics, Irina Heudeber, as she recounts the lives of her parents Paul and Maja, lovers separated by politics on either side of the Berlin Wall. Irina's narration jumps back and forth from the present day, with references to pandemic mask-wearing and the war in Ukraine, to 2001, revisiting her memories of an academic conference convened in honor of her deceased father, a distinguished mathematician, and survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. That conference, held on September 11, 2001, is interrupted by news reports of the terrorist attacks of the day, and the extraordinary density and intensity of the historical events that shaped her parents' lives leads Irina to remark, "Tous les fils de l'Histoire paraissaient rassemblés dans une main unique" (40). The hand holding all the threads belongs to the author, needless to say, and Matthias Enard, winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt for his novel Boussole, juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated narratives in productive tension to create this dense, polyphonic novel. Irina's personal reflections are complemented by a series of other texts intercalated within, including letters from her father, excerpts from a book he published, and even the Stasi surveillance files for both her parents, compiled over the years. The formal complexity of Irina's narrative becomes ever more elaborate through Enard's oscillation between his literary universe and real-world referents. Irina's story is densely packed with precise dates, times, and places, "Je suis arrivée à Weimar le jeudi 7 avril 2022 aux environs de 16 heures … Un missile russe était tombé sur la gare de Kramatorsk en Ukraine" (228). Her father Paul, a fictional mathematician, studies under the real-life figure Emmy Noether (100) and potentially influences the work of the Fields award-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (117). Paul's research focuses in part on Riemann surfaces, and Enard's extreme erudition evokes a reference to the writing of Maurice Blanchot, whose work L'interruption: Comme une surface de Riemann theorizes the significance of interruption, pause, and distance between interlocutors. That dynamic describes the relationship between the two narrative threads of this novel, which initially seem totally disconnected. In counterpoint to Irina's precisely situated reconstruction of the geographical, historical, and political currents of her parent's lives, the narrative thread of the military deserter is exaggeratedly denuded of traditional spatiotemporal signposts. Bereft even of proper names, a man, a woman, and a donkey navigate a treacherous landscape on the margins of an unnamed war zone. Both humans are deeply marked by the memories of the trauma they have endured and inflicted, "Il était l'un d'eux, làbas, ses amis et lui, lui et ses cousins, les brutes, les tortionnaires, les violeurs End Page 141 auxquels il était impossible de donner le nom de soldats" (79). Borders, beliefs, trauma, history, and memory emerge as common threads linking the narratives in this initially daunting but ultimately engrossing novel. End Page 142 Philippe Brand Lewis & Clark College (OR) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French