I wrote about the delights of placelessness in fiction a few weeks ago, and then I read Mathias Énard’s Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, which is so deeply place-bound that I needed to write about it, too. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Énard, and this book is an utter romp: I can’t think of anything else that could remind me by turns, and weirdly, of Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, M.F.K. Fisher, Alexander Pope, all in one book (those are the Anglophone names, at least). It’s not a perfect novel by any means, and not even Énard’s best—I wished for an editorial hand, as I often do when I read things written in French.
First, though, I almost can’t get over Frank Wynne’s feat of translation here—I did write him that fan letter, acting on the principle that no translator ever gets enough attention, and told him that just thinking about translating he had to do (drunken dialogue in rhyming couplets, a thousand descriptions of specific places and foods, a host of trans-historical voices, and a whole to-do about regional dialects) made me ill. The hardest part of translating, or one of them, is getting the voice, but what do you do with the kind of novel that eats all the voices? It’s a radically different position for the translator, to do all the voices rather than to work towards inhabiting just the one. (Most of Énard’s work in English is translated by Charlotte Mandell, also dazzlingly.)
Anyway, place. For another essay: is there something about special about marshes for fictional location—something about the shifting, sedimenting layers? The particular smells, lights, half-buried vegetation? The way things collect and settle there? I wrote about two non-place place marshland settings earlier (Gracq and Cusk), but here Énard’s subject, as much as anything, is a marshy place, a real place, western France’s Marais Poitevin—the whole book is something of a love letter to the place, even if it’s the weirdest love letter ever written.
No one’s asking anyone to choose between unreal real place and real place, but I guess here, as ever, I come down on the side of the real. (I’m also reading Rachel Eisendrath’s wonderful Gallery of Clouds: “the real is what is to be wondered at.”) The payoff, I think, of writing about a real-place, is that the unfreedom, the tethering, to that place means you reach for your references and ideas and words and characters within that place—you reach deeper, rather than elsewhere. If things in the universe of the unreal real come easily to hand, imaginatively summoned from wherever they are, imparting a sense of ease and freedom, things in the real cycle and recur. Writing about life in a place—and this is the point of Énard’s novel—is also writing about death, about time, and about history.
Here is one of the novel’s characters, musing and thinking about the place. The description slips around in time, taking a kind of Proustian survey of a familiar geography, but my favorite moment is the one simile in this passage. Notice, here, that at the moment when the writer might use the reach of figurative language to bring in something from elsewhere (for that’s what figurative language can do) the simile instead remains fully local: “the setting sun gleamed the setting sun gleamed on the slates of the Château de la Taillée like the back of a perch.” This passage is, the actual setting is, all about fishing. Fishing for perch, we learn from the novel, is an integral part of the place. The book is dedicated to Énard’s father, with a note from Énard: “During one of our last conversations, my father confided that the thing that had given him the most pleasure in life was angling.” There’s no fish caught in this passage except by the simile. The simile pulls it out for us to admire, this thing that is part of the region’s lifeblood. All the beauty of the sun setting on the particular place is best described by a glitter particular to that place. What’s here is less an imaginative summoning than a kind of inventory: what’s needed is already here, and very beautiful:
Omnia vincit amor, love conquers all, paludum Musae, O Muse of the marshlands, let us sit and sing in the cool of the beech, in the drowsy shade of the elm, let us sing these lines of tragic love, in Latin, the language of Messalina, of guilty passions and of the invisible Christ, the language of forgiveness, of desire and of medicine: so mused Marcel Gendreau, the author-cum-schoolmaster, as he sat with fishing rod in hand on his folding chair at a bend in the Sèvre, there where the valley sloped gently through lush green fields before the willows, the poplars and the limestone cliffs—a little farther away, the setting sun gleamed on the slates of the Château de la Taillée like the back of a perch, toward the slightly lumpen Romanesque church of Échiré, with its octagonal bell tower whitewashed by various renovations, firmly embedded in the soil of Poitou by the Middle Ages and the Plantagenets, where soon, in the waning light, would come the drone of vespers and the folding of fishing rods.
this was so delightful to read—I love how you described the exuberantly committed placefulness of the novel, how detailed and present the marsh is
this especially was such a great articulation and makes me want to revisit other literature that’s very local, where the environment is always present in the thoughts and actions of characters:
“The payoff, I think, of writing about a real-place, is that the unfreedom, the tethering, to that place means you reach for your references and ideas and words and characters within that place—you reach deeper, rather than elsewhere. If things in the universe of the unreal real come easily to hand, imaginatively summoned from wherever they are, imparting a sense of ease and freedom, things in the real cycle and recur. Writing about life in a place—and this is the point of Énard’s novel—is also writing about death, about time, and about history.”