{"product_id":"compass-9781910695234","title":"Compass","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, \u003ci\u003eCompass\u003c\/i\u003e is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out – like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard’s most ambitious novel since \u003ci\u003eZone\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘One of the finest European novels in recent memory.’\u003cbr\u003e — Adrian Nathan West, \u003cem\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure as \u003cem\u003eCompass\u003c\/em\u003e. Reading it amounts to wandering into a library arranged in the form of an exotic sweet shop, full of tempting fragments of stories guaranteed leaving you wanting more.’\u003cbr\u003e — Eileen Battersby, \u003cem\u003eIrish Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘\u003cem\u003eCompass \u003c\/em\u003eis a challenging, brilliant, and – God help me – important a novel as is likely to be published this year.’\u003cbr\u003e — Justin Taylor, \u003cem\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Crisply translated by Charlotte Mandell (as was \u003cem\u003eZone\u003c\/em\u003e), \u003cem\u003eCompass\u003c\/em\u003e is Proustian in its set-up. There are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.’\u003cbr\u003e — Tobias Grey, \u003cem\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it. Enard speaks Persian and Arabic, and he has taught at universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region, a “zone,” as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine books, three of which have been translated into English, he has charted a course through this zone, writing about sectarian violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism, tradition, and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue’s gallery of thieves, killers, and eccentrics. Enard’s prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (\u003cem\u003eZone\u003c\/em\u003e is a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But it’s the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Enard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.’\u003cbr\u003e — Jacob Silverman, \u003cem\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Enard is like the anti-Houellebecq, and he deserves far more attention.’ \u003cbr\u003e — Sam Sacks, \u003cem\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/em\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘The beauty of \u003cem\u003eCompass\u003c\/em\u003e is the sheer breadth and density of its vision, calling forth a multitude of different worlds, bound only by the capacious mind of its narrator, an aging Austrian musicologist named Franz Ritter.’ \u003cbr\u003e — Jeffrey Zuckerman, \u003cem\u003eNew Republic\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East ... [a] strangely powerful work.’ \u003cbr\u003e — Steven Poole, \u003cem\u003eGuardian\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fitzcarraldo Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50578590400855,"sku":"9781910695234","price":14.24,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781910695234.jpg?v=1746100026","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/compass-9781910695234","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}