Meet Mathias Enard
- Tue 22 September, 19.00
Topping and Company, Edinburgh
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Tue 15 September, 19.00
Toppings and Co., York
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Wed 16 September, 19.00
London Review Bookshop
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Énard is wickedly, brilliantly, subversive of sanctity.
Ruth Scurr, The Guardian
All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.
Joshua Cohen, New York Times Book Review
A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.
Christopher Beha, Harper’s
Perfecting the Shot (La Perfection du tir, Actes Sud, 2003) follows a teenage sniper in a nameless, war-torn city whose only goal is to fire the perfect shot. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at the people below, killing civilians and combatants indiscriminately while his traumatized mother cowers in their flat. His routine is disrupted by Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for her, and his growing obsession threatens to push them all into the abyss. Appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard’s debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, told in spare, unflinching prose.
About the Author
Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. His novels are published in French by Actes Sud: La Perfection du tir (2003; Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie); Remonter l’Orénoque (2005); Zone (2008), which won the Prix Décembre, the Bourse Thyde-Monnier SGDL, the Prix Cadmous, the Prix Candide, the Prix Initiales and the 2009 Prix du Livre Inter; Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’éléphants (2010; Prix Goncourt des Lycéens); Rue des voleurs (2012), published in English as Street of Thieves, which won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News; Boussole (2015), published in English as Compass, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize; Le Banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs (2020); Déserter (2023); and Mélancolie des confins (2024). Perfecting the Shot is his seventh novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.