Velimir Chlebnikov (detail), 2004, thirty paintings (oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead, and mixed media on canvas) by Anselm Kiefer. Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation © The artist
Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95.
Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell. As Énard has described it, he had been working on a research-heavy project appropriate for quarantine isolation—a historical novel about an emblematic twentieth-century life, an East German mathematician-poet and survivor of Buchenwald whose idealistic loyalties and disappointments charted sixty years of European history—when, in February 2022, the twenty-first century intervened. The war in Ukraine, as Énard puts it, invaded his notebooks. It would leave in his project a datable trace, the way tree rings record catastrophes. The plan of the novel fractured, doubled. Now, alongside the fictional biography of his Communist mathematician, Énard would have to add a wholly new element, operating in a different register, one of up-to-the-minute urgency about war. The result, published in French as Déserter later that year, is full of stops and starts, with a postimpact jaggedness to its fragments. The question The Deserters raises, though, is less about what happened in Eastern Europe in 2022 to split the novel in two—that, we know all too well—than how or even whether history ruptures. What is an interruption? A fissure revealing something that was always bubbling underneath, a switch of the rails to another timeline, a return to a prior state, an awakening from a dream?
If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship between change and continuity has long been Énard’s preoccupation. Since his virtuosic 2008 novel Zone, a reflection on the recurrence of genocidal conflict in Europe from Nazism to the Bosnian War and its echoes in an even more distant past, told in what is largely one several-hundred-page sentence, Énard has made his name as the writer most devotedly skeptical of the fantasy of a Pax Europaea—most disappointed by the lie, because most beguiled by the possibility. Europe in Énard’s fiction dissolves into vast, immemorial geographies, like the basin of the Mediterranean, stretching from Algeciras to Beirut, with its coasts and enveloping arid hills; or the tight immigrant quarters of entrepôts, linked in a continent-wide network of migration and capital flow; or the intellectual exchanges that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. His work is suffused with such affection for the edge places where Europe bleeds into its others—Venice, Trieste, Alexandria, Algiers—that the continent becomes all edge. It caught the mood of the liberal cosmopolitanism of the century’s first two decades, paralyzed as it was by the impasse in which the European project’s utopian imagination seemed both insufficient for its success and in excess of what national governments would accept.
Énard’s are Schengen-era novels: his characters are always on the move—on flights, ferries, ships, and riverboats, and particularly on trains. These characters often belong to the set of people who either long to, or are compelled to, follow polyglot and transnational destinies: scholars, artists, refugees, and what all of these are often suspected of being, spies. In their border crossings, they have occasion to note the different ways Europe was once segmented into the lost kingdoms of the past—al-Andalus, the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire, postwar occupation zones—whose dividing lines, over land or sea, were erased long ago. Sometimes they dream of restoring those dispensations, if only to reconfigure their current world differently. Sometimes these dreams are nightmares, of the atrocities once committed over those vanished boundaries.
Charlotte Mandell has given English-speaking audiences Énard’s two major works: first Zone, whose narrator, a French-born Croatian, merges his own past as a volunteer in Balkan combat with a history of violence unspooling backward from the operations of the SS to the Iliad; then Compass, which narrates one insomniac night in the mind of a Viennese musicologist whose erotic yearning for an Orientalist scholar leads into countless microhistories of East–West contact, darkened by the more recent fates of Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad. Although geographically constrained to Deux-Sèvres, the region where Énard was raised, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, translated by Frank Wynne, is built around a transpersonal kind of dream: reincarnation. The novel describes souls who, in the wheel of time, inhabit the Frankish king Clovis’ horse, or a bedbug that fed on Napoleon. All these novels exult in esoterica, daring the reader to open a web browser and follow up on Énard’s anecdotes and curious historical divagations. They are meant to release you from the constraints of territory and era and personal identity into alternative possibilities, sinuous lines of hidden connection. Propelling that release are Énard’s almost interminable yet strikingly untangled sentences: long streams of thought pulsing only with the little hesitations of the comma, gathering in their current the exotic and the mundane, the distant and the proximate, as if moving to the rhythm of History itself.
In the twelve fraught years between Zone and The Annual Banquet, crash and pandemic, Énard’s work seemed to be trying to stiffen the resolve of liberal European cosmopolitanism by a double gesture: offering it greater imaginative amplitude while also correcting its tendency to imagine its own innocence. Look how many cultural paths you might take, his books suggest—how many ways to imagine human collectivity there are! And yet: look, too, at how often such paths have been pontoon bridges floating on currents of violence, how many artists and scholars (and dreamers) have allowed themselves to drift into complicity with oppressors. Énard himself—a Frenchman who became a scholar of Arabic and Persian; a resident of Barcelona sympathetic to Catalan independence; a poet and novelist and even an owner of a Lebanese restaurant in Barcelona’s Gràcia district—could be taken as an icon of postnational possibility: polylingual, polymathic, undeceived but somehow still sanguine, neither fool nor fatalist. By 2015, when Compass won the Prix Goncourt, his fiction had been ratified as a resource for the embattled liberal consensus, dazed as it then was by shocks from the collision of the rising xenophobic right with the incidence of terrorist attacks in European capitals. Here was an artist committed to tugging that Europe into different shapes and pulling it back to deeper pasts, so as to undermine all the ideological fortresses being built around national borders and identities.
“Europa,” Énard said, with some creative precision, when he accepted the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2017, “was a Lebanese princess kidnapped on a beach near Saïda by a God from the north—Zeus—who desired her.” It’s a deeply characteristic remark: part hailing of a group identity and part challenge to that identity, meant to coax you out of political despair through the invocation of a mythic collective memory. It was his way, indirect and allusive, of situating the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in its moment—the moment of central-bank-enforced austerity measures causing mass unrest across southern Europe, of the Syrian Civil War, Britain’s triggering of Article 50—and saying: Understand, that northern god is still having his way. At its best, Énard’s fiction titrated consolation and warning, flattery and rebuke, so precisely that you might feel you could go on fighting the battle for a cosmopolitan future even as you suspect you’re losing it. Allons, enfants du continent!
Looking back at that period from 2025, you’d now be tempted to say: So that was what it took, in those years, to be consecrated as a genuinely European writer. That was what it took to feel heartened.
The Deserters announces the end of that moment—more so, its shattering. It is two novella-length narratives, interrupting and echoing each other, while existing in separate tonal and imaginative universes. In one timeline, Irina Heudeber, a historian of Islamic Golden Age mathematics, recalls in 2022 the international conference held more than twenty years earlier to commemorate her father, Paul, a giant of twentieth-century number theory. Paul, who had been part of the early Communist resistance to Nazism, had been imprisoned at Buchenwald, where he wrote a late modernist masterpiece, a treatise comprising prose, verse, and mathematics called The Ettersberg Conjectures. After the war, he lived in East Berlin, and remained stubbornly loyal to the GDR even beyond its demise. Irina’s mother, Maja Scharnhorst, a glamorous West German public figure associated with the Social Democratic Party, supplies the inspiration for the memorial conference, and perhaps has pulled strings for its funding. Both Maja and Paul were born in 1918, and were partners and lovers until their separation, when Paul was arrested in Belgium by the Gestapo; they remained epistolary lovers after the war, their only child, Irina, shuttling back and forth across the Wall in her adolescence. The formal proceedings of this bizarre “fluvial conference”—on a whim of Maja’s, the gathering is held on a ship called the Beethoven that will cruise the Havel River between Berlin and Potsdam—happen to begin on September 11, 2001. The twenty-first century announces itself on television on the conference’s first afternoon, bringing the celebration to a premature end. What is left are questions no longer just scholarly: What happened in Paul and Maja’s past? How did they navigate, in their parallel universes, the fate of Germany since their meeting in 1938 until Paul’s mysterious death in Spain in 1995—and why, and how, did he die? What, if anything, does New York in 2001 have to do with the catastrophes embedded in the places they float past, most notably among them Wannsee?
The milieu here is familiar from Compass: the professional, transnational elite, scholars of just-above-modest renown who are just about superannuated. Urbane, self-conscious, and lovelorn, they sift through the remains of personal histories they’ve scarcely understood. As is Énard’s habit, this autumnal narrative is interrupted by inset texts: letters written from Paul to Maja during the years of their separation; fragments from The Ettersberg Conjectures; and later correspondence to Irina from an American mathematician who had once been Maja’s lover. There is the dream, which also surfaces in the almost supernatural briefcase in Zone that carries a record of decades of European atrocity, of putting back together the dispersed remains of the past. But the inventive force that propelled those earlier novels is weaker here. Énard’s wildly loose sentences have been constricted into something more wryly observational and therefore more conventional. Finally, this section of The Deserters—let’s call it the Heudeber novella—is a fusion of campus novel, even if the campus in question can float, and spy novel, where the agents in question ceased acting long ago. The two genres remain at a slight distance, observing each other warily. Paul Heudeber himself, heard only through his writing, is too big a figure to be contained by either, and so remains hazily enigmatic. As for the others on that boat of mathematicians, they’re diminished people. No small part of their diminishment is that, as of the afternoon of 9/11, they’ve outlived their century.
That was where Énard started. But the shock of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led him to write a companion to the Heudeber plot, a stark novella about a wartime deserter attempting to escape across a border. It is far less tethered to novelistic detail than almost anything Énard has published before, even more fablelike than his first novel, La perfection du tir, a study of the psyche of a sniper in a civil war much like Yugoslavia’s or Lebanon’s. Writing The Deserters’ second plot, Énard has explained, was a way to succumb to what he’s called his war trauma, his obsession with the history of European bloodshed, linked in his mythos to the Balkans of the Nineties. Not that this novella is at all grounded in specifics; it jolts into the abstract time and space of nightmare. The unnamed deserter from an unnamed conflict, an ironmonger’s son with only a rifle and a knife to protect him, walks across an archetypally Mediterranean landscape that is nothing less than the basin of European history itself. As he climbs in search of a temporary rest at a mountain cabin his family once owned, he is seen by another human in flight, a woman with a donkey who was cast out of her community for the crime of having been raped by the enemy, hair shorn as a sign of her shame. Each represents a threat to the other. Will he rape her, too? Steal her supplies, kill her, let her go? Will she escape and notify the nearby town of his presence? Will either make it to the border? It is all too primal for histories or proper names. Just hills, and groves of oranges and olives and rosemary in early spring, and the pack animal, and human shit and the blood of birds shot for food, and somewhere on the horizon, the sea.
Too primal even for prose. Here Énard enjambs his sentences into a kind of incantatory free verse:
This solitude is so perfect, sitting on the ground, in the aromas of clay and the sounds of the water falling from the roof,
could you stay here, wait for the war to end, wait for peace, lost in the midst of the mountains, with no neighbors, no parents, no memories? Memory is a downpour to be driven away, inner hailstones,
he sits down crouched against the wall, like a soldier in a corner of the barracks courtyard,
the rain has stopped,
the wine-colored sky is sinking into evening.
Énard has always been an eager and playful antiquarian of the novel’s prehistory: picaresque narrative in 2012’s Street of Thieves; the Arabian tale in Compass; Rabelaisian homage in The Annual Banquet. The Deserters’ wartime plot goes back further still, to epic, and in earnest. Its images seem to be derived from some anthropological account of primeval human conflict. Its figures are exemplary, their motivations too stripped-down for anything like ideological personification—just man, woman, animal.
There isn’t anything obscure about Énard’s design, which is to wrench open each narrative universe with the force of the other. As you go back and forth between the two, each provokes dissatisfactions with the other. After the stark suspense of the wartime plot, the refined obscurities of the Heudeber plot feel pallid and fussy; after the historical density of Heudeber’s world, the longue durée of the wartime plot seems frustratingly obscure, limited to the here and now of the senses. The Oedipal mechanics of Irina Heudeber’s search into her parents’ past jars against the eternal present of the deserter’s story. One novella builds to betrayal and withdrawal, the other to confrontation and even a kind of solidarity. There is no middle ground between them, no conciliation, just two different foci without much narrative stereopsis.
Neither of these universes, however, has the oneiric quality of Énard’s previous work, the sense of memory and history and legend blurring together into an enveloping fog in which the connectedness of all things discloses itself. Both of The Deserters’ novellas are more conventionally earthbound. On board the Beethoven in 2001, Irina isn’t dreaming; like everyone else, she’s being roughly woken up by history. In the hills with the unnamed deserter, on the other hand, the immediate demands of survival are too urgent for any reasons or histories, the frame of reference too pared down for the generous luxury of the usual Énardian sentence. Here the versified prose reads like an attempt to echo the syntax and poetic meter of a dead language, and in its approximation of ancient epic, it slips into what you might call the higher cliché. Lines like “nature itself calls war to mind,” or “childhood lurks, it’s a monster like any other,” or “you are a man without a tomorrow, condemned to yesterday and today,” try to summon up an epic innocence, a state in which it is still possible to speak any truth as if it were entirely new, without the knowingness and irony of novelistic prose. The language occupies that moment when always meets once upon a time.
In other words: allegory. The black smoke rising in the distance, the sound of shelling, the outcast woman and the hungry, furtive man and the burned-out villages they’re fleeing: it’s not so much Bosnia or Syria or the Donbas as Force itself, descending like some divine rebuke. No wonder that the first violence the refugee woman suffers in her flight is not enacted by the deserter, as she’d feared, but erupts from the impact of a lightning strike, as if delivered by the storm god himself. (Remember Europa and the bull-Zeus who rapes her. Énard might, in a way, be the last man who believes in the old gods.) In the Heudeber novella, however, we have historical realism rather than allegory. The story of Paul and Maja, and the different but intertwined paths of antifascism their lives take, insists on a structure of dates and calendars and turning points: flight from Germany in 1938; the liberation of the camps in 1945; Berlin’s cleaving in 1961; New York’s smoking wound in 2001; and then, just at the moment when Irina begins to narrate her story, Russian missiles hitting Ukrainian train stations in 2022—each instant is its own distinct nightmare, and each seems to obscurely connect to, or prefigure, a later one.
Allegory and historical realism do not usually get on well with each other. Their division in The Deserters—split between a chastened regret for the failure of the postwar dispensation and a panicked feeling that some deep human irrationality has erupted once again—expresses a crisis in how to understand the end of the end of history. Not that Énard doesn’t suggest a relation between the two. The trick lodged in both novellas is a constant habit of furtive parallels, echo and counter-echo; and finally, inevitably if obliquely, they come close to touching. The deserter tends to the wounded woman, and together they make it to what he calls the Black Rock, an ancient fortification high in the hills with “ruined ramparts that vomit their red and white stones into steep piles,” where he believes they can hide. There he imagines others having taken refuge, too, “people from other eras, maybe even other languages, other beliefs, and like him, watching enemies arriving from the valley—the enemy is the only certain thing.” Meanwhile, Paul Heudeber, in the mid-Nineties, travels to Spain. It is where he will die, either by accidental drowning or suicide. In a letter to Maja, the last such trace of him the novel gives us, he notes that he writes from “a big rock which probably belonged to the ramparts of a Greek colony.” This is clearly the same rock, wormholing its way between two historical dimensions: in one, it is the mythic site where the wheel of human violence, turning with each era, dumps its human refuse; in the other, the trace of a specific historical agony that prefigures so many later ones. In the first, the pattern in singularity; in the latter, the singularity that suggests the pattern.
It’s a deft maneuver of Énard’s, this occult parallelism of mythic archetype and history. The imaginative dexterity needed to perform it, however, serves only to point out how stubbornly alien they are to each other. You can have it both ways, it seems, but not at the same time. The tension of Énard’s sentences had always inhered in their assimilative quality, their strenuous attempt to gather all of Europe and all of Europe’s necessary others, so many different pasts and ways of being and ways of organizing the world, within their elastic confines. The maximally long sentence—which has had such an international vogue in the past decade or so, in the work of Lucy Ellmann and László Krasznahorkai and Jon Fosse and others, all with their different shapes and tones—might, despite its century-long genealogy, have been the artifact of a brief early-twenty-first-century moment in which it still seemed possible to surmount ideological contradictions with the sheer force of wildly distended syntax, form alone making the world cohere. With The Deserters, it seems as if Énard has given up the attempt.
Maybe the fault line was the twentieth century’s end, even if it’s taken a while to realize it. Thinking back to the early days of the new millennium, Irina muses nostalgically: “All the threads of History seemed gathered together in a single hand.” A tragic century, the twentieth, but from the standpoint of early 2001, perhaps not yet an irredeemable one—perhaps one with a historical logic that might have sublated its own tragedy, spawning postnational or supranational imaginaries to prevent its recurrence. Now the choice is to look back, with those forlorn mathematicians on the boat cruising past Wannsee, at the redemption that didn’t arrive; or, with the unnamed deserters on the hillside, to grab your rifle and face the return of the old gods of storm and war. Two unconsoling and strangely empty universes, one full of obsolete ideologies and vain regrets, one with nothing of either sort; you might say, two kinds of helplessness. Maybe, then, the book does not record an interruption so much as, to use Énard’s own favorite image, a terminus: the end of the line for that high-speed train into the post-conflict European future that the twentieth century was supposed to have built.
The Deserters, to Énard’s credit, already knows about its own failure to cohere. Its master image is the way two things can never quite become one, as in Irina’s description of the conference’s awkward organization, split between an older German luminary and a young female graduate student from Bosnia:
This addition turned out to be as disastrous as it was hilarious: instead of adding to each other, these two forces seemed either to be pointlessly combining, or canceling each other out. Things forgotten were forgotten twice, blunders doubled. It was like a drawing made by two ballpoint pens attached with a rubber band: parallel lines never joining, despite all their efforts, constrained by Euclid himself.
It is there in what we hear was Paul Heudeber’s life’s work in number theory, on twin primes—pairs of prime numbers that differ by two—and whether such pairings occur infinitely. It is there in Paul and Maja’s decades-long East–West love for each other, the kind of love where betrayal can be indistinguishable from fidelity. It is there in the hesitant, mutually suspicious relations between the male and female deserters, in which need and fear stalemate each other. And it is there in the fantasy hybrid of modernist verse and number theory that is Heudeber’s Ettersberg Conjectures. You can put two things next to each other, but they will remain separate, if bound together by arcane laws of attraction.
It all seems to reflect on the strange parturition of The Deserters, in which one story becomes two, not by union but by catastrophic rupture. What is interruption but the kind of division that multiplies entities? Here another myth lurks, not as obviously as some others in the novel. “My father walked on two legs,” Irina tells us: “algebra and communism.” Two, in The Deserters, closely bound as they may be, never quite act with the force of one; doubling tends instead to interrupt, stutter, encumber. Did Paul Heudeber’s two legs carry him without trouble? Not if you take seriously what Énard gives us of Heudeber’s writing:
Walk, step
I count one at each prime number of steps . . .
I walk
I add the infinitely small
I collapse
I walk
I add a fragment of infinitely small
I keep adding till I get to the ceiling . . .
The steps converge—
The steps converge and everything tends towards nothingness
As Mandell reminds the English reader in a footnote, “walk, step” is an untranslatable pun: marche, pas, or “walk, not.” Two legs, it seems, don’t necessarily carry you well; and all those steps, or “nots,” might be leading to nothingness, or naught. The novel is full of limping: not just Paul Heudeber’s stumbling walks in the inferno of Buchenwald, but the exhausted, uneven gait of the deserter with his rifle; the hobbling of the woman and her donkey, both with leg injuries caused by shrapnel from the lightning strike; and even the tipsy staggering of the conference’s attendees, whom Irina imagines falling into the water as they leave an onshore dinner for their boat.
The limp is the primeval sign, in many cultural myth systems, of autochthony: humans born from the earth, parentless. As Énard no doubt knows, it was what Claude Lévi-Strauss, thinking of Oedipus’ swollen feet, considered an imaginative response to the mystery of procreation, the strange fact that it takes two to make one, that our origin is always divided. Lévi-Strauss read Oedipus’ limp as the sign of his, and our, desire to escape from the overdetermination of split ancestry into something simpler, purer. This peculiar logic buzzes fitfully through The Deserters. In the novel’s historical-realist mode, we get one side of the Oedipal myth: it took two people—quixotic, principled Communist and equivocal, compromised liberal; two Germanies, in fact—to make Irina Heudeber; a cleft in her lineage, not to mention contemporary Europe’s lineage, that she struggles to synthesize. In its mythic mode, we get instead a meditation on autochthony. The outcast woman and fugitive man aren’t just types; they’re figures rooted in the landscape, they’re natives, ur-Europeans. They seem to have grown out of their soil, and the violence they suffer and enact is a product of that soil, too, a springtime return of the perennial violence of group against group. Énard, seeing the tanks roll in early 2022, may finally have succumbed to the fatalism of Europe’s eastern frontier. It’s as if he no longer quite trusts the historical mode and the utopianism that underwrote it. You can almost hear, in the half of the novel that 2022 pulled from him, fatalism’s slang phrases: bloodland, sorrow harvest, the blackened earth, age-old hatreds—the sound of giving up.
Énard’s novels have always walked on two legs: a deeply cosmopolitan historical sense and a formal inventiveness to give it shape. In The Deserters, those legs don’t quite coordinate. It’s not only an interrupted novel but an undecided one; it isn’t sure where it’s going, precisely to the extent that it seems despairingly sure where European history is going. What use is historical consciousness, it seems to ask, when history repeats itself with such idiot force? A novelist of Europe’s real and imaginative frontiers, Énard is compelled now to watch Europe turn into and on itself. You could find his response here instructive, but it’s no longer heartening.
