Winner of the Prix Goncourt (2015) and the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (2017), in addition to numerous other plaudits, Mathias Énard returns with his eighth title. The Deserters, an unsettling diptych translated in sparse and raw overtones by Charlotte Mandell.
The Deserters abhors linearity and is a simmering hot bed of questions both unresolved and ambivalent. The slim concoction of novellas, alternates between the travails of an unnamed soldier – a deserter – escaping the horrors of an unknown conflict, and a commemorative academic conference held in the middle of the Havel on board a cruise boat “pompously” named the Beethoven. The academic conference is in memory of the cerebral and gifted mathematical genius Paul Heudeber. Heudeber, an ex-inmate of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, infused philosophy, poetry, and art into the arcane world of Mathematical topology.
Irina, the daughter of Heudeber, narrates the events panning out at the floating conference, while an invisible voice—ephemeral yet gritty—recounts the story of the soldier, serving as a foil to his physical toils and gumption. Shielded by the cover of darkness and thick foliage, the soldier heads toward an old, isolated wooden cabin, which may have once served as his home. An unexpected acquaintance with a woman and a haggard donkey throws more than just sand in the soldier’s gear box. A war victim herself (and from the remnants of the physical humiliations inflicted upon her, such as sheared hair and rag tag apparel, a designated ‘traitor’), the lady and her mute companion may pose a veritable threat to the soldier’s escapade.
Meanwhile in a place far removed from the ravages of conflict, Irina confronts a few ghosts herself, as the participants in the conference begin to reveal in drips and dribbles the complicated, chaotic and asymmetrical life of Paul Heudeber and his wife, Maja Scharnhorst, the latter a guest of honour aboard the boat. The conference however ends abruptly with the cataclysmic events of 9/11. A participant leaves the conference distraught. This, after confessing that his daughter happened to be in one of the Towers at the very moment an airplane sliced into its exteriors.
Énard brings a deliberately exasperating quality to his writing. Just when the reader reaches a point of catharsis, eagerly anticipating a revelation that might unlock a pestilent mystery, the author douses her with a pail of chilly water. Offering not clarity, but deeper bewilderment and perplexity. Even the humble donkey in the story has a powerful role to play. Amidst swirling conundrums of uncertainty, existential crises, unpredictability and unfathomability, the animal remains the sole and steadfast constant. The fascinating conjectures of the title suggest that the soldier is not the only ‘deserter.’ Is every protagonist in the story a hapless soul fleeing its own fears? Fleeing towards redemption that may ultimately prove to be a mirage or a pyrrhic victory? These musings, Énard, conveniently and remorselessly leaves, to his readers.
The Deserters is a difficult, yet delightfully absorbing book to read. Two different stories seemingly far removed from each other yet possessing a beguiling and perhaps inextricable link with each other. Two paths tracing their own trajectories yet seeping into one another, converging, diverging, prodding and probing.