Having begun working on a book about a fictional East German mathematician, Mathias Énard found that the war in Ukraine “invaded [his] notebooks . . . The resurrection of the discourse — Nazis, denazification, was bringing the 1940s back to us . . . Odesa, the Alexandria of the Black Sea, was about to suffer the fate of Sarajevo.”
The resulting novel alternates between two distinct storylines. Published in French by Actes Sud in 2023, its faithful translation by Charlotte Mandell now appears in English, as the war drags on.
One narrative strand of The Deserters concerns the late mathematician Paul Heudeber, a survivor of Buchenwald who remained a loyal communist and anti-fascist until his death by drowning — a suspected suicide — in 1995. His historian daughter Irina recounts a conference held in her father’s honour on a boat on the river Havel in September 2001, cut short by 9/11. She was there to present a paper, but also to get answers to questions about her father’s life and his relationship with her mother, Maja Scharnhorst. Maja was in the German resistance as a teenager and worked as a politician in West Germany after the war, while Paul stayed in the GDR.
Énard’s Ukraine-inspired storyline meanwhile follows a soldier fleeing the violence of a nameless war. We meet the deserter — filthy and exhausted — scaling a mountain in the Mediterranean. Heading north towards the border, he takes shelter in a cabin that belongs to his family, where he remembers hunting trips with his father. He comes face to face with a woman he vaguely recognises from the village, accompanied by her donkey. Much of the suspense, such as it is, arises from the tension between the deserter and the woman. Is she right to be frightened, or will he overcome the violence within himself to keep her safe?
Political conflict is a persistent theme in Énard’s oeuvre. Zone — Fitzcarraldo Editions’ inaugural “mission statement” publication — featured a Croatian mercenary turned spy intent on exposing war crimes. Street of Thieves was about a teenager fleeing Islamic fundamentalism amid the Arab Spring. Compass, the 2017 International Booker-shortlisted translation of the Prix Goncourt-winning Boussole, considered the relationship between Europe and the Middle East through the eyes of a musicologist. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, translated by Frank Wynne, covered the violent history of western France, where Énard grew up.
The chapters about the deserter are visceral, full of sensory detail. Refreshingly, the story considers the treatment of women in war. The prose is deconstructed, with poetic line breaks and intermittent capitalisation and punctuation, as if war decomposes language itself. Unlike Énard’s usual first-person, however, it’s told mostly in a close-third, with sometimes shifting points of view. Its parabalistic quality, intended perhaps to make us consider all wars, somewhat mitigates the reader’s emotional engagement.
Mandell has valiantly translated five out of the six of Énard’s novels published in English, including Zone, a single-sentence 500-plus-page stream-of-consciousness. In The Deserters, she errs on the side of literal translation, leading to the occasional niggle. The deserter is described as “a poor guy in a family of poor guys”, for example. “Poor guy” is pauvre type in the original, which has a condescending connotation, perhaps more akin to “loser”. But the bulk of clunkiness — mid-sentence tense changes, for example — accurately reflects Énard’s choices, equally awkward in French, rather than Mandell’s translation.
Irina’s first-person account, intermingled with letters, would seem to be more personal, but here too we are kept at arm’s length by her academic tone and reference to her parents by their first names, making it more of a historical treatise. While containing thematic echoes, the two strands of the book run in parallel without ever intersecting. Although not in itself a problem — we don’t need things to be tied neatly in a bow — their stylistic differences break the narrative flow.
While the French title, Déserter, is in the infinitive, the plural noun of the English title hints that there is more than one deserter, leading us to wonder who will betray whom. Maja, who was abandoned as a baby, leaves her family in East Germany to pursue her career in the west and is suspected of being a double agent; Irina escapes to Cairo; Paul takes his own life. Further family secrets unspool, suggesting that morality is more ambiguous than we think. The deserter, not least, must abandon the war to recuperate his humanity, invoking God to help.
By bringing together Nazi Germany, the failure of the utopian vision of socialism, 9/11 and what we take to be a contemporary war in The Deserters, “all the threads of History seemed gathered together in a single hand”, as Irina observes on the boat. We sigh at Maja’s optimism about a more peaceful 21st century. With his consistent representation of war in his fiction, Énard reminds us to shed our rose-tinted glasses. Even before Ukraine, Europe “has not only been a peaceful and a wonderful place to live since the end of the Second World War”, Énard told Granta in 2018. “You’ve had the Cold War, you’ve had many violent episodes, and you’ve had this horrible war at the end of Yugoslavia. I hope that literature can help us to remember that.”
The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell Fitzcarraldo £14.99/New Directions $16.95, 224 pages
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