Mathias Enard's Reading List

"Sadeq Hedayat wrote his first long story, The Blind Owl , in the 1920s, thus becoming the first important Iranian novelist. The codes of the “occidental” novel were almost unknown in Iran and Hedayat was the first to play with them in an Iranian context. The Blind Owl is not only a great novella, dark and disturbing like an opium vision, an erotic nightmare, it is also the first example of this kind of fiction in the Persian language—something like a fantastic tale. Its originality comes precisely from its narrator. We don’t know his name, but he’s telling us about himself, his intoxication, his cruel love story. Somehow we understand that he’s deceiving us, that he is probably out of his mind. Or maybe not…. Maybe the horrors he’s telling are true. In a way, Hedayat’s narrator was an inspiration for the creation of Franz’s voice in Compass ."

"It’s very similar. Season of Migration to the North is also a story of deception through narrative voices. In this respect Season would be halfway between The Blind Owl and a subversion of One Thousand and One Nights . The main character of Season is not the narrator himself, as in Heart of Darkness , for example, where everything we know about Kurtz, we learn from Marlow. Season works in the same way with an intermediate character placed between us—the reader—and the main character, Mustafa Saïd. Pretty much like Scheherazade herself would tell a tale… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a masterpiece. Probably the best Arabic novel of the 20th century. Subtle, dark and deeply ironic. It describes very well both rural life in Sudan in the 1960s and the relationships between Orient and Occident in the same period. It’s a tale of acculturation, of nativism and of sexual domination of man over women. It’s a tale of books, also. It’s about literature. A very free novella. Unique. I remember reading it for the first time in Cairo, in 1992, in the French translation. Then again in 1994 or 1995, in the Arabic original. The freedom of its style, the pleasure of its language and broad register stuck me then. I have read it many times since in Arabic and in translation with my students. It’s always an immense pleasure."

"I learnt to forget what my teachers had taught me! We’re always taught that Arabic fiction in the 19th century isn’t worth a read and is incredibly boring. Well, I can swear to you that this incredible 1,900 page novel is not! It’s the craziest book I’ve read. A mix of epic novel, travelogue, political encyclopaedia, autobiography and… Arabic dictionary. It’s ironic, clever, always funny, it’s unique. Such a book teaches you that everything is possible if you are totally free, if you can free your mind from clichés and existing images of what a novel should be. I hope someday to be able to write something this impressive, with such a broad scope."

"Again a Mediterranean classic, but this time a Greek one. Written in the 1960s by a Greek—Stratis Tsirkas—who grew up in Egypt, in Alexandria and Cairo. These Drifting Cities are in fact the cities of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo, all three portrayed during the Second World War, during the exile of the Greek government in Egypt. “Literature should be like this: vital” It’s one of the most sumptuous love stories I’ve ever read…. Of course, it’s a political and tragic love story. A desperate love story set in utterly violent times. The narratives of the Second World War are seen from a very Mediterranean point of view."