Categories: ARTS

Book Review: ‘The Deserters,’ by Mathias Énard

THE DESERTERS, by Mathias Énard; translated by Charlotte Mandell

Mathias Énard’s latest novel, “The Deserters,” conjures its layered melancholy from a pair of interwoven narratives. The first explores the probable suicide of Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician and Buchenwald survivor, as recounted by his now elderly daughter, Irina. The second follows the perilous desertion of a soldier in a nameless contemporary war.

Utterly distinct in form and tone, these braided stories demand a certain vigilance from the reader, an alertness to echo and intuition. Recalling the twinned prime numbers in one of Heudeber’s theorems, rhyming catastrophes in each account give shape to both history and the more inscrutable intervals of an individual life.

Embedded in Irina’s diaristic remembrances, the shards of Heudeber’s story glow with passion and sorrow. His daughter’s present-day recollections center on Sept. 11, 2001, when she and her mother, Maja, attended a scientific conference celebrating the works of the recently deceased Heudeber aboard a cruise ship on the Havel River. News of America’s devastation reached the panelists, and the ensuing limbo permits Énard to divert us into a heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past.

A silhouette of Heudeber — a lifelong Communist, we discover — emerges from this swirl of annals and anecdotes. His brilliance, his charisma, his devotion and optimism constitute a vision of total political commitment, an almost mystical progressivism. His likely suicide, by drowning, lingers over the proceedings, an open question.

Heudeber’s magnum opus, the “Buchenwald Conjectures,” written during a six-year imprisonment at the death camp, may suggest an answer. Its sui generis combination of abstruse number theory and poetry can be seen as expression of faith. “Mathematics was the other name for hope,” he tells a journalist who interviews him in his final months.

The betrayal of that hope plays out in a series of revelations late in the novel. As Irina and Maja watch the towers fall, again and again, the terrible events seem to consign Heudeber’s extraordinary life — and his legacy of unflagging resolve — to an annihilation even more final than death.

If the Heudeber chapters are more formally direct and immediate, the deserter sections feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like “Zone” and “Compass,” a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.)

The nameless protagonist of these chapters, a ragged, exhausted soldier, flees an unspecified conflict — “the sage world of sweat, terror and screams” — as he returns to a rural shack where he spent time as a boy. He is surprised there by a woman and a donkey, the pair fleeing a different sort of wartime humiliation. Despite mutual suspicion and the constant threat of violence, this biblical triad sets out on a journey toward a border that they hope to cross into safety.

There is a Job-like quality to the novel’s preoccupations, a crying out in a wilderness of pain and confusion. If there is any consolation in our shared perdition, it remains so distant as to be inscrutable: “I sometimes feel as if all of this is connected, obscurely,” one of Heudeber’s colleagues remarks, “that we’re all connected to each other like a series of numbers, even though we don’t really understand how.” History itself comes to seem an impenetrable formula, a theorem awaiting its impossible proof.

In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey — Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero — endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of “The Deserters,” this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.

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