Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Homeric in its scope and grandeur, remarkable in its detail, Énard's American debut is a screaming take on history, war, and violence. Francis Servain Mirkovic, the son of a French father and a Croatian mother, is a spy whose job it is to resell stolen secrets to their legitimate owners. His "Zone" is the Mediterranean. It is the early 21st century and he is on his last mission, taking a train from Milan to Rome under a fake name and revisiting, in a blistering stream-of-consciousness (periods are few and far between), his childhood, his career, and various women, among them Sashka, the Russian painter he plans to meet in Rome; Marianne, from his youth; and Stéphanie, his fellow agent. Weighing heavily on him is his time with the Croatian army during the "Yugoslav madness," where he witnessed and took part in atrocities. As Francis's train speeds along, his story picks up momentum, becoming nearly frantic by the final stretch. Mandell's translation of the extravagant text is stunning. (Dec.) (c)
Copyright © PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Copyright © PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Good books lay out the rules for you. Bad books fail to follow their own rules, or never lay them out at all. This book does a good job of laying out the rules: the book will be something you experience as much as something you understand, the book will build by slow accretion, the book will have meaningful rest points for you to collect yourself and your thoughts. I found it took me a while to figure out these rules, especially the third one, but that once I did, the book followed them faithfully and the rewards were proportionate to the effort required to read it. Some passages were gruesome and painful to read, but they weren't gratuitous or exploitative, they were appropriate to the subject. I would be interested to read more from this writer. If you've already read some Bernhard, Joyce, or Proust, this book will not be too challenging as far as the form it uses, which does required sustained concentration.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By jafrank
Format:Paperback
Zone is a remarkable book. The premise of the whole thing will seem like an almost eye-rolling cliche, a jaded intelligence operative is on a train from Milan to Rome to sell a handcuffed suitcase full of intelligence secrets before he leaves the spy business forever. That train ride is all that 'happens,' conventionally speaking. But the torrent of memories, historical facts, and nightmarish complicities that unfold in an unstoppable bum-rush from his head is as delerious and sweeping as almost anything I've ever read. Like W.G. sebald, Enard is interested in worming down into the bizarre resonances of history, by showing the cross linkages between cycles of destruction, war, and erasure. Yet unlike Sebald, whose work is so grounded by specific geographic locales and his photo-montages, Enard just flows ever outward, sucking more and more of the world through the exhausted, haunted mind of his protagonist. Zone is a total book. It tries to incorporate the whole history of Europe, Northern Africa, the Near Middle East, any place that in any way touches the Mediterranean basin gets pulled in. The range of references to literature and to (at least for a young american) obscurant, often monstrous geopolitical issues in this book is overwhelming. And I do mean overwhelming. Almost every page had me running to try and find a map of croatia or some information about a forgotten turkish war hero, or a minor bosnian war criminal, or trying to tease apart some weird reference to the battle of troy. Yet for it's deluge of erudition, the book never feels like it's just an intellectual dick measuring contest the way that a lot of sprawling high modernist stuff is. Enard filters whole civilizations through a whirlwind of run-on consciousness, not merely to show off intellectually, but to try and find traces of the endless volume of shadow lives and shadow histories that are what secretly support the conventional historical narratives that we all live in and reckon with. Zone is a book about moving forward, both in space and in time, about being shackled to history and how that, paradoxically, can make us free.(
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By las cosas
Format:Paperback
The set piece of this novel is a 517 kilometer train trip from Milan to Rome told in a one-sentence, 517 page novel. And before you sigh...not one of those things!...let me assure you the narrative moves briskly and there are none of the affectations of an academy novel you might associate with the one sentence schtick. The narrator (who, like the author, is a French-born Croat) left his Paris home as a youth to fight with the Croatian rebels in 1993 and then works a decade for French intelligence. During that time he assiduously compiles a record of everything he can find pertaining to the Zone, and is now delivering those files to the Vatican in exchange for his 30 pieces of gold. And that zone runs from Yugoslavia to Israel to Greece, from his grandfathers' war years, one as an early Ustashi, the other a French resistance fighter to his father's role as an interrogator in Algeria, to the atrocities he committed in Croatia.
Interwoven with the narrator's personal history is the history of the region, bristling with interesting facts, and made alive by a wonderfully dreamy narrative that is extremely evocative of the semi-trance one enters on a long train ride: "I feel as if I'm floating all of a sudden, the train is passing over a series of switches and is dancing, the lights of the countryside pirouette around us in a random ballet that makes me nauseous or is it the memory of the war".
After leaving Croatia he travels to Venice, la serinissima, but finds only adventure novels and nights filled with liquor and the war stories of a Lebanese exile. This finally drives away his long-suffering fiance, and his only other relationship is with a fellow spy who reads only Proust and Celine, and sees her spy craft as a set of dry statistics to be compiled and analyzed: "that great Celine-ian pragmatism of the 1930s - 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution". Her shock after watching a documentary on the Croatian war is as believable and depressing as the narrator's inability to show any remotely appropriate emotions when she announces she is pregnant with their child. And as readers we share with the narrator the book's location, "one foot in the gray Zone, the Zone of shadows and manipulators".
It is easy to have pat answers when you live in a shell of genteel civility. Move to the zone, to the cross-roads of violent history, and any easy solutions dissolve. While not a new or unique message, the lyricism and historical breadth with which this is told sets it apart.
Interwoven with the narrator's personal history is the history of the region, bristling with interesting facts, and made alive by a wonderfully dreamy narrative that is extremely evocative of the semi-trance one enters on a long train ride: "I feel as if I'm floating all of a sudden, the train is passing over a series of switches and is dancing, the lights of the countryside pirouette around us in a random ballet that makes me nauseous or is it the memory of the war".
After leaving Croatia he travels to Venice, la serinissima, but finds only adventure novels and nights filled with liquor and the war stories of a Lebanese exile. This finally drives away his long-suffering fiance, and his only other relationship is with a fellow spy who reads only Proust and Celine, and sees her spy craft as a set of dry statistics to be compiled and analyzed: "that great Celine-ian pragmatism of the 1930s - 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution". Her shock after watching a documentary on the Croatian war is as believable and depressing as the narrator's inability to show any remotely appropriate emotions when she announces she is pregnant with their child. And as readers we share with the narrator the book's location, "one foot in the gray Zone, the Zone of shadows and manipulators".
It is easy to have pat answers when you live in a shell of genteel civility. Move to the zone, to the cross-roads of violent history, and any easy solutions dissolve. While not a new or unique message, the lyricism and historical breadth with which this is told sets it apart.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
