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...
