REVIEW: Walking on Two Legs: Mathias Énard’s interrupted history, Harper’s

by Nicholas Dames, Harper’s

athias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell. As Énard has described it, he had been working on a research-heavy project appropriate for quarantine isolation—a historical novel about an emblematic twentieth-century life, an East German mathematician-poet and survivor of Buchenwald whose idealistic loyalties and disappointments charted sixty years of European history—when, in February 2022, the twenty-first century intervened. The war in Ukraine, as Énard puts it, invaded his notebooks. It would leave in his project a datable trace, the way tree rings record catastrophes. The plan of the novel fractured, doubled. Now, alongside the fictional biography of his Communist mathematician, Énard would have to add a wholly new element, operating in a different register, one of up-to-the-minute urgency about war. The result, published in French as Déserter later that year, is full of stops and starts, with a postimpact jaggedness to its fragments. The question The Deserters raises, though, is less about what happened in Eastern Europe in 2022 to split the novel in two—that, we know all too well—than how or even whether history ruptures. What is an interruption? A fissure revealing something that was always bubbling underneath, a switch of the rails to another timeline, a return to a prior state, an awakening from a dream?…

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