Spin the wheel

The novels of Mathias Énard are frequently described as “encyclopedic”, a term used by Italo Calvino in his discussion of multiplicity in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), where he speaks of “the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of this world”. Énard’s best-known previous novels, Zone (TLS, November 7, 2014) and Compass (2017), have a broad cultural, political and historical scope, yet they manage to reconcile their digressive mode of narration with clear thematic concerns.

At first glance Énard’s new novel, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild – which first appeared in French in 2020 – seems more modest in ambition, focusing on life in a village in the Deux-Sèvres region of western France, the area in which he spent his childhood. Its opening section is narrated in diary form by David, a young Parisian doctoral student who has come to study “what it means to live in the country nowadays”. From the start he is a ridiculous caricature of the jejune urban intellectual, complaining about the backwardness of the locals and drawing hasty conclusions, such as that “countryfolk and city folk both agree on the need for food quality”. While the limited comic potential of this kind of fish-out-of-water narrator is quickly exhausted, David’s experiences provide an introduction to the more interesting inhabitants of the village. Arnaud can recite the famous events of any day in history; Martial is both the mayor and the local undertaker.

The subsequent section opens with a priest being reincarnated as a wild boar. Énard’s chief narrative conceit throughout the rest of the book is of the wheel of life, a cycle of karmic rebirth in which murderers are reborn as worms and a lustful barkeeper is destined to return as a bedbug that bites Napoleon. These reincarnations can occur at any point in time, though the mechanics of Énard’s scheme seem somewhat ad hoc – late in the novel someone comes back as a storm. Calvino envisaged a pan-psychic novel that would “give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic”, but Énard ultimately shies away from such experimental territory. The main function of the Wheel of Life in this novel is to allow Énard to explore the history of the region by telling the stories of the villagers’ ancestors. The narrative jumps about in time and adopts different literary registers, and though Frank Wynne’s translation copes ably with this, the result is a narrative with little forward motion. Apart from a few minor mysteries and subplots concerning environmental activism in the region, most of the narrative is taken up with recounting legends or filling in the blanks of the characters’ past lives. The end of the novel returns to David’s story, only to resolve it in a predictable way.

The banquet of the gravediggers’ guild forms the centrepiece of the book. Written in semi-rhyming, often archaic prose over eighty pages, and powered by Rabelaisian energy, it features a group of new characters who tell stories, eat, drink, trade barbs, debate the entry of women to the guild, eat more and engage in theological arguments about death. It is a virtuosic set piece, both stylistically and in its mastery of culinary expertise, yet it feels divorced from the rest of the book. Incoherence can be an end to itself – Georges Perec’s Life: A user’s manual (1978) makes its raison d’être the incompleteness that results from embracing multiplicity – but the looseness of Énard’s novel does not appear to derive from any higher principle. The closest thing to an overarching narrative comes from a few scattered references to the future. By the mid-twenty-first century, we learn, “all hominids had long since been swept away by floods, hatred and disease”. This seems to indicate some moral judgement on the characters as exemplars of humanity, though the force of this eschatological thrust is blunted by an earlier, equally glancing remark about a character being reborn in the twenty-second century, “before the renewal of Times, the era of the Maitreya, the future Buddha”.

The Annual Banquet can be considered encyclopedic in a different sense from the one meant by Calvino. With its lengthy retelling of episodes from the region’s history, its detailed depictions of the physical landscape, shifting seasons, flora, fauna and the region’s agricultural quirks – cows used to be transported by boat to pasture – this is a compendium of knowledge about a single subject, a billet-doux to Deux-Sèvres. But while it contains passages of interest, the overall result will be a trifle baffling to anyone who does not share those tender feelings.

Nick Holdstock is the author of China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, terror and the Chinese state, 2015, and the novel Quarantine, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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