Boussole. by Mathias Enard. Actes Sud, 2015.

While I was reading Boussole this past February Syrian government forces recaptured the

ancient city of Palmyra. For ten months the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant wreaked havoc

amidst some of the most extensive ruins of the Roman Empire, decapitating not only a sculpture

of the Greek goddess Athena, but also a real live archaeologist Riad al-Asaad, director of the

UNESCO heritage site. Before historians rejoice at the victory they might think about a reputed

plan to use the city as a launchpad for operations against desert strongholds further east.. Will the

antiquities be any safer with government or opposition forces than with ISIL, collateral damage

still being damage? It continues difficult to tell the good guys from bad in this three-sided

conflict, four or five-sided when we factor in Russia and America, looming and not always

helpful colossi of East and West.

Palmyra is the setting for one of the most intense and vivid episodes in this gorgeous novel,

winner of the Prix Goncourt for 2015. Best known to Anglophone readers for his 500-page one-

sentence tour-de-force Zone, Mathias Enard has written a romantic elegy for comparativists, a

lament not for lost civilizations or academics past, but for the possibility of shared human

culture.

The protagonist, an Austrian ethno-musicologist named Franz Ritter, passes a wakeful night,

drowning his dread of an upcoming medical diagnosis in a sea of memories of his career on the

overflowing boundaries of Orient and Occident, often in the company of the loved and elusive

Sarah, a part-Jewish Parisian scholar with a penchant for researching mythical and medical

monsters. A neighbour walks his dog. Franz makes himself a cup of tea. And that's it. The

narrative begins at 11 pm and ends at 6 a.m.

The "boussole" of the title, a compass given to Franz by Sarah, is a replica of a compass

belonging to Beethoven. Why did Beethoven possess a compass? Even as a known walker, he

scarcely needed a compass to find his way around Vienna. Did he plan a major expedition? A

patron requested a setting for some oriental texts, but Beethoven declined, and the nearest his

music approached the Orient seems to have been the "Turkish March" from The Ruins of Athens.

Franz's compass possesses a further idiosyncrasy; it points not north but east. Sarah proposes

various explanations and solutions, but the compass remains an instrument of illumination and

mystic magic, and a personal symbol based in Vienna, capital of Austria, Österreich, the

"Eastern Realm".

Franz's mind detours via Bizet, Wagner, and Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus back to Beethoven and

a meditation on Opus 111, the final piano sonata, and its lack of a third movement, which is, he

decides, present in its very lack - in the heavens, the silence, the future ... In his notes to the CD

I possess, pianist Robert Silverman agrees: "Finally, the theme begins again, like a phoenix

rising from the ashes, transporting us to a state of spiritual ecstasy that will continue into infinity,

even after all is silent."

The patron who suggested that Beethoven write oriental leider was Joseph Freiherr von

Hammer-Purgstall (1727-1835), author of a monumental history of the Ottoman Empire,

translator of Persian poets, first president of the Austrian Academy of Science, friend of Balzac

(who included a page of Arabic text in his novel Le Peau de chagrin,), translator of A Thousand

and One Nights, teacher of Friedrich Ruckert, whose poems were set to music by Gustav Mahler

- thus, thinks Franz, uniting Mahler to the poetry of the Persian poets Rumi [13th century] and

Hafez [14th century]. Hafez's lyrics, translated by Hammer-Pugstall, inspired a work by

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: the West-East Divan, which is also the name of the youth
orchestra established at the turn of this millennium by the Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim and

the Palestinian scholar Edward Said... and so the "narrative" goes. One thing leads to another,

rambling back and forth over two or three thousand years of European - Orient shared history.

The novel's music, literature and scholarship are genuine; with the exception of a half dozen

admittedly fictional characters, everyone referred to checks out on Google. No reader is likely to

have time to follow every lead; Enard/Ritter wraps us in a rich tapestry which is both our culture

and another's woven together over many centuries. The "New World" of America is scarcely

mentioned.

In a twist of self-reflexive irony Said's 1978 book Orientalism has become part of his own topic,

still controversial thirty-five years after publication, and in this novel steadfastly defended by

Sarah in colloquia and around desert campfires .

Franz's wakeful night is now, the time of the book's appearance in 2015. His reminiscences go

back to the early 1970s, when Iran was ruled by the Shah and the president of Syria was Hafez

al-Assad, father of the current incumbent Bashr al-Assad. In Aleppo and Damascus Franz, Sarah

and their fellow Orientalists of many nations and specialties profited from Syria's calm bestowed

by the Assads. At Palmyra they camped for a night on the grounds of the ancient fortress of

Fakhr-al-din al-Maani, which at my time of writing has not been destroyed, and tried to ignore

the general "fear spreading over the whole country like smoke" or the proximity of the sinister

Tadmur prison. A place of horror for Assad enemies, the prison has been demolished apparently

to no one's regret; it was not on UNESCO's list of heritage sites.

In Iran youthful intellectuals and idealists cheered the departure of Shah Mohammad Reza

Pahlavi and welcomed what they expected to be the dawn of social justice, until they realized the

oppressive agenda behind the Islamic revolution. In an episode which I can only hope is true,

foreign diplomats in Tehran reacted to the ban on alcohol by gathering clandestinely in the

cellars of the French embassy to brew a vintage from local grapes. They christened the wine

Cuvèe Neauphle-le-Chateau, for Avenue de Neauphle-le-Chateau, the republic's name for the

previous Avenue de France after the village in France where the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini

rented a house in 1978. I have not been able to verify this story on the internet, but I have learned

that the issue of wine at lunch is an ongoing obstacle to diplomatic relations between Iran and

France.

His mind turning to the recent death of Jalaleddin Weiss, a Paris-born musician who embraced

"oriental" composition, Franz speculates whether the death was from cancer as reported or

"perhaps from seeing what he had constructed ... a world of shared ecstasy, of the possibility of

meetings, participation with otherness ... thrown on the flames of war. " He imagines Weiss in

paradise joining 12th century poet and diplomat Oussama Ibn Mounqidh, and wonders what

Oussama would think of recent photographs of warriors of the jihad burning musical instruments

condemned as "non Islamic" but "undoubtedly derived from ancient Libyan military fanfares,

drums, drums and trumpets ... the same which the Franks copied from the Ottoman centuries ago,

the same drums and trumpets which Europeans described with terror because they signified the

approach of the invincible Turkish Janissaries." "No image," thinks Franz, " represents better the

battle which the Jihadists wage in reality against the history of Islam, than these poor guys in

combat gear, in their bit of desert, in the process of destroying the sad martial instruments,

ignorant and oblivious of their provenance." In February 2016 The Economist reported that
collateral damage from the bombing of Aleppo includes "the muwashshah, a courtly song-form

to which Syria’s second city has been home for 800 years. The style is known as “Andalusian”,

because that is where it originated—Al-Andalus, Moorish Spain. " Franz of course knows the

Andalusian connection, his Spanish ruminations returning him with Gypsies through the

Balkans, back to France and Bizet's Carmen. He knows all the connections

And on March 17 2016, the Guardian reported the murder by ISIL of the Syrian poet

Mohammad Bahir al-Aani, best known for his opposition to the Assad government. Irony upon

irony. War upon the other is also war upon oneself - and not only for the Islamists.

The smoke of Opium wafts through the novel. Franz is initiated by his colleague Faugier, but he

is addicted more to its history, ambience and medical possibilities than to the drug itself Sarah

researches its mythology, its literature and its role in the culture of colonialism, and while still in

Paris delves deeply into the further east as far as Viet Nam and the need to escape from oneself.

I am reminded of the eerie scene in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now redux, cut from

the film as released in 1979, where a French family clings to their plantation years after their

defeat, beautiful in their elegant clothes, fine dining, and tender preparation of their pipe.

A selection of spirits haunting Franz's night would include besides those mentioned elsewhere in

this review and numerous others: Novalis, Hector Berlioz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marie Duplessis

a.k.a La Dame aux Camellias, Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner and his Tristan, Heinrich Heine,

Franz Liszt who transported his piano to Turkey for a concert, Alphonse de Lamartine, T.S.

Eliot, Omar Khayyam, Stendhal, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud who founded the house of Saud and

attempted a production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself and

the Rondo alla Turca and Abduction from the Seraglio, Honoré de Balzac, Napoleon Bonaparte,
Franz Kafka, Frederick Chopin, Thomas Mann, Charles Baudelaire, T. E. Lawrence with a

discussion of the film Lawrence of Arabia and whether the Omar Sharif character or the Anthony

Quinn is more authentic, Agatha Christie, Felicien David, Felix Mendelssohn. Theodore

Gauthier, Béla Bartok, Leopold Wess, Karol Symanowski, Miguel de Cervantes, Ian Fleming's

brother Peter, Giuseppe Verdi, Gioachino Rossini, Claude Debussy, Franz Schubert, Avro Part,

and Gaetano Donizetti's brother Giuseppe who could be credited with introducing Western music

to the Ottoman ruling class. Sarah likes to trace the wanderings of the androgynous Swiss writer

Annemarie Schwarzenbach. There is a catalogue of lullabies and a history of beheadings, and at

the back of the text, a table of contents, in old German Fraktur script, for an imaginary magnum

opus "Some Different Forms of Folly in the Orient," which serves as a summary of possible

themes: Amorous Orientalists, Caravan of Transvestites (including Lawrence of Arabia and other

occidentals in awfully long clothesi), Gangrene and Tuberculosis, Portraits of Orientalists as cult

leaders, and Encyclopedia of the decapitated.

Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet lurks in this reader's memory, receives a passing

reference as a "dreamer". Yet Durrell's narrator Darley bears more than a passing resemblance to

Enard's Franz, "a pale monster in spectacles", self-deprecating, almost timid but persistent,

omnipresent, observant, a witness. Clea, eponymous heroine of the last quarter of the Quartet,

could be a forerunner of Sarah, emerging from an obsession with illness and mutilation, to

something resembling hope. It is an earlier epoch, before and during World War II, but the same

games are afoot. In the Quartet's first volume Justine is smuggling arms to Jews in pre-Israel

Palestine. Enard evokes Durrell more explicitly in Zone, but the protagonist there, Francis

Servain Mirkovic, is a combatant and spy, altogether a different specimen from Darley picking
up his pen to begin a story or from Franz tripping about his apartment in his oversized Arab robe,

embedding his compass in a dream of prayer rug and/or flying carpet.

At the beginning and the ending of his long night, Franz quotes a stanza of "Fruhlingstraum"

("Dream of Spring"), one of the songs from Franz Schubert's Winterreise settings for poems by

Wilhelm Muller, father of Max Muller, German-born philologist and Orientalist, and a founder

of the discipline of comparative religion. "Die augen schliess ich weider,/ Noch schlagt das Herz

so warm./ Wann grunt ihr Blatter am Fenster?/ Wann halt' ich mein Liebchen im Arm? " "I shut

my eyes again,/ my heart still beats as warmly./ When will you turn green, leaves on my

window?/ When shall I hold my sweetheart in my arms? " Robert Jordan's translation for the

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/ Alfred Brendel recording reminds me of the 16th century English

ballad: "O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow/ That the small rain down can rain?/ Christ, that

my love were in my arms,/ and I in my bed again!" Balladeers, troubadours, crusaders .... and a

translation that is not a translation, but something more essential.

Franz has something to say about translation. Hans Berthge (1876-1945) adapted rather than

translated "oriental" poetry which was set to music, for instance by Mahler in "Das Lied von der

Erde", somehow maintaining an essence, something in common among languages and times.

There is no original: " il n'y a pas d'original Tous est en mouvement. Entre les langues. Entre les

temps, le temps de Hafez et celui de Hans Bethge. La traduction comme pratique métaphysique.

La traduction comme méditation."

Enard's prose is often breathtaking, so quintessentially French that one worries how it will bear

the transition to another language. Reassuringly, the translator for the forthcoming English

edition will be Charlotte Mandell, who translated Zone . I have not read the earlier novel in the
original, but the English is close enough in voice to the French of Boussole to prompt

expectation of another treasure of shared culture. But how, I wonder, will she manage the

distinction, if any, between "rêve" and "songe" in the following passage. "Car il y a un Orient au-

dela de l'Orient, c 'est le rêve des voyageurs d'autrefois, le songe de la vie coloniale, le rêve

cosmopolite et bourgeous des wharfs et des steamers." Franz says there are three "Orients" - the

Near East, which is the main source of his own thought; the Far East, where Sarah spends time in

China, Nepal, Sarawak and Viet Nam; and the East of an individual's dreams or a civilisation's

aspirations.

As his night draws to its close, Franz receives an email from Sarah, quoting a 1960s song about

Vienna by a French pop star named Barbara, and his magic carpet takes off again, past 12th

century Persian poet Sohravardi and his crimson archangel, Robert Schumann and his ghazals,

indeed all the ghazals ever created, and at last back to Schubert and his winter journey. The light

is listless, atonal, and the sun is tepid: "la lumière atone de l'espoir," "au tiède soleil de

l'espérance." In his conclusion, Enard plays with the connotations of two words "l'espoir" and

"espérance" - anticipation, expectancy, hope.

Now, it is May 2016, and musicians from St.Petersburg's Mariinsky orchestra have performed in

the theatre of Palmyra, the same Roman theatre where last November young ISIL recruits

executed Syrian captives. The concert, titled "With a Prayer from Palmyra: Music Revives the

Ancient Walls," celebrated the theatre's recapture by Russian-backed Syrian forces. Looming

from a mainstage video screen, Russia's president Vladimir Putin dedicated the concert to

victims of the "terrible evil" of "international terrorism". While some "Western" politicians and

media fumed about a blatant act of propaganda in an active war zone, conductor Valery Gergiyev

opened the programme with Pavel Milyukov playing J.S. Bach's Chaconne for solo violin, a
work which, the maestro said, "emblematizes the power of human spirit and suits today's event in

the best possible way."

Franz Ritter refers to Bach seldom. pimarily in relation to Mendelssohn and Wagner, and as if

his dominance is to be taken for granted, perhaps as an emblem for the power of the human

spirit. One can but hope.

i
Dashing around in those awfully long clothes http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Chad_Mitchell_Trio:God_Is_Dead
Chad Mitchell Trio, 1967