14

“And then, a single bullet leaves the gun, travels twelve metres through the air at a height of seven hundred metres and, at a thousand metres per second, enters Nobles’ left eye and re-emerges above his neck, behind his right ear, and from that moment the Farman, out of control, hovers for a moment and then takes a pitch that becomes increasingly vertical, and Charles, with his mouth agape, over Alfred’s slumped shoulder, sees the ground approaching ever closer, into which he is about to crash at full speed with no alternative but an immediate and irrevocable death, without the slightest trace of hope – a ground that still belongs to the commune of Zonsery-sur-Velle, a pretty little village in the province of Campagne-Ardennes, whose inhabitants are known as Zonca-viduliens.” Having chronicled in his own distinctive way the artificial solitude of charismatic eccentricity (Ravel), the compulsive endurance of the long-distance runner (Zátopek) and the natural genius (Tesla), Jean Enoz, himself a solitary writer on the contemporary literary scene, widens his focus just enough to accommodate five friends trapped in the trenches of the most outrageously bloody chapter in human history. One hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, which was to cost the lives of sixteen million people, Jean Enoz, in just one hundred pages of a novel that begins with the description of a double-faced summer and ends with the birth of a man, clears away even the most suffocating pages of history with his unrivalled narrative finesse and, above all, with the jabs of his bitter humour that exorcise Evil and bad literature.

Following the masterful ‘biographical’ trilogy (Ravel, Zatopek, Tesla) and the densest, most austere and understated novel ever written about the First World War (14), the greatest stylist of French literature returns to the genre in which he has served with such distinction. His freshest (in every sense of the word) novel is an adventurous odyssey through the labyrinths of chance, the Paris metro and, above all, the ever-changing map of international politics, as, quite simply, a pop singer with a single (but colossal) hit is recruited by the French secret services to destabilise the North Korean regime! Delightfully strange and unpredictable, full of unexpected twists and coincidences, a novel with a… delightfully smooth narrative and a humour that never lets you settle down and view things rationally! What more could you ask for, after all? Echenoz returns to his literary roots: a crime plot with intensely cinematic action, full of humour and irony. A master of the absurd, he is clearly our most entertaining novelist. Le Nouvel Observateur