Mathias Énard is the defining novelist of Schengen-era Europe: its most lyrical cartographer and its fiercest critic. His proto-modernist works feature the transnational destinies of the perennially nationless; they turn on transit, fragment at border crossings, ferment at immigration depots; they dissolve into the vast, palimpsestic geographies of the Mediterranean and Eurasian plate, colliding at the edges in a fractured totality that resists the closures of national mythology. If the Trea...| European Literature Network
Perspectives begins, naturally, with a murder. Jacopo da Pontormo, the painter often credited with shifting the course of Florentine Renaissance art, has been stabbed through the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’ in San Lorenzo (since tragically lost to a fire in the eighteenth century, though still venerated by art historians as near-equals to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel). According to Giorgio Vasari’s influential account of the period, The Lives of the Artis...| European Literature Network