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
Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Prieur as an exhaustive examination of one man’s mind, with the biographer ‘descend[ing] 20,000 leagues beneath the sea’ to plumb its great depths. But no matter what depths are dived, ‘the v...| European Literature Network