REVIEW: Survivors of War and Disaster, Seeking Refuge in Math, The New York Times
by Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times
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…