Mathias Énard is a French novelist who has gained recognition in Europe for the scale of his ambitions and the hurtling, anarchic energy of his prose. He has a large appetite for disaster, and his books are packed with wars, massacres, terrorism — with human depravity of every kind.
His sentences spin on and on, acquiring a giddy momentum as they lurch through gutters and brothels and kill zones, ending, as often as not, in some netherworld morning-after epiphany. These lurid narratives are also a bouillabaisse of tacit and open reckonings with the writers who have shaped him, both high and low: Céline, Joyce, Burroughs, Homer, Pynchon, the authors of French série noire thrillers.
Énard is best known for his 2008 novel “Zone,” a wildly erudite book composed of a single 500-odd-page sentence that takes place in the mind of a French-Croatian spy as he travels from Milan to Rome. The plot sprawls across centuries of time and worlds of space as the narrator recalls his own career and lets his mind float through a war-torn landscape haunted by Dante, Ezra Pound and many others. If that sounds unbearable — and at times it is — Énard’s encyclopedic ambitions are leavened somewhat by the propulsive rhythm and dreamlike layering effects of his prose, well rendered in Charlotte Mandell’s translation.
By comparison, “Street of Thieves,” also translated by Mandell, is mercifully modest in scope. This time Énard’s narrator is a young Moroccan who comes of age amid the Arab uprisings of 2011. Those revolts, with their arc of euphoric insurrection and tragic descent into violence, are irresistible bait for a writer like Énard, who is an Arabist by training and teaches Arabic at the University of Barcelona. Yet he wisely avoids pegging his story too closely to the rebellions, which are, after all, still playing themselves out.
Like Énard’s previous novel, this one is an hommage of sorts to his literary heroes, in particular the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri and the medieval explorer and chronicler Ibn Battuta. This time Énard weaves those models more seamlessly into his story as part of the developing consciousness of his protagonist, a bookish working-class boy named Lakhdar who ends up homeless after his father discovers him in flagrante with a cousin. His early days as a drifter, forced to beg and prostitute himself on the streets of his native Tangier, are clearly inspired by Choukri’s celebrated memoir, “For Bread Alone.” Later Lakhdar discovers that book, thanks to his Spanish girlfriend.
He also reads Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier some 700 years earlier, and includes passages from the explorer’s accounts of his travels. Here the echo is more ironic: Lakhdar never gets farther from home than Spain, but he invokes Ibn Battuta’s exotic anecdotes as metaphors for his own dislocating, often wildly macabre adventures. These parallels can be powerful; but at times the literary mirror effects strain credulity. When the former street urchin starts citing Casanova, Malcolm Lowry and various Arab poets, one senses the novelist’s own voice infecting his character, who observes that he is “locked up in the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good.”
Énard is at his best when he takes his eyes off Literature and uses his narrative gifts to convey Lakhdar’s adolescent yearnings: anguished love for his Spanish girlfriend and nostalgic loyalty to a childhood friend from Tangier who is slowly being radicalized by an Islamist sheikh. This second plotline, seen through Lakhdar’s thoroughly lapsed but sympathetic perspective, is artfully told, and represents the kind of fiction one hopes will emerge, from Énard or others, after the tumult once known as the Arab Spring has receded a little further into the past.
ROBERT F. WORTH in the New York Times
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