THE DESERTERS

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 novel Zone (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.