Matias Enard. “The other remains unrecognizable, even and especially when we think we know him”

for the Inter Book Award Area: and for the Goncourt Prize CompassMathias Enard is knitting To the desert, his new novel, two narrative threads. The trajectory of the East German mathematician Paul Heideber, to whom a conference is dedicated, described by his daughter Maya, echoes the escape of a deserter in an unnamed country who meets a woman on the run… This book is love and death, combined with memory and history. with reflections on, asks, can we get rid of the war when it has undermined and irritated the entire 20?^e century? Doesn’t loyalty to one’s self go hand in hand with betrayal of others?

Madame Figaro. – Is it true that the Ukrainian war influenced the writing? To the desert ?
Mathias Enard. – Let’s say I started a fictional biography of Paul Heideber when, at the beginning of the Ukrainian war, I felt that the novel should turn to current events, because I wanted to try to tell a story of the 20th century.^e century to the present day and show how this century is rooted in constant war violence. It was then that the character of the deserter appeared to me. Because, after all, what is our history if not the effort to leave war behind, even more than its violence as such? Hence this character who emerges from the conflict and will try to put down the gun to go into exile.

You used a certain structure with contrasting worlds facing each other…
I wanted to create opposites that interact. In the Paul Heideber section I tell the story of the century from a central point, everything is very documented and contextualized historically, geographically, sociologically, with precise dates, temporalities and places, while in the dedicated section I have done the opposite. to the deserter, which is as if blurred. We do not know where and when we are, even if I am very accurate about the description of nature, elements, relationships with the environment, landscapes. It was like a counterimage or projection, to use a mathematical term, with an absolute transformation of the writing, which allowed me to fill in the gaps left by Paul Heideber’s story in a different way. One fits into the other.

Why did you choose a mathematician as the central figure?
For a personal reason, firstly, I’ve always been passionate about maths, I almost did it at university. Then they present the project of a real totalizing utopia, especially in the 20th century.^e century. To me it’s a sense just like sight, hearing, touch or taste. Mathematics tells the world in a different way, in a unique language. And it is a universe in which we strive to achieve perfection with a desire for progress and universality. Today, when everyone doubts the universal, no one doubts the universality of mathematics; is and has been everywhere, in all countries, in all cultures, in all times. And in Europe, it’s fascinating from a historical perspective, with these early 20th-century gatherings of mathematicians.^e century, this huge German school that produced an extraordinary series of mathematicians since Leonhard Euler, and then was destroyed by National Socialism because half of the mathematicians were Jewish… I also wanted to read the history of Europe through a prism. about the history of science. Finally, this is the area where the biggest transformations have taken place. We always talk about quantum physics, but it would be impossible to think about these objects without certain mathematical tools. Both stories show that the other remains unrecognizable, even and especially when we believe we know them… The question of this unknown for oneself and others, the question of the impossibility of understanding the other, of having access to their true face; a recurring theme in my work, like war and historical violence, this collective violence is precisely related to the impossibility of knowing the other on an individual level. And it is surely no accident that I chose to be a novelist. in the novel there is an education in empathy for others, whether you are a reader or an author, an attempt to approach others with words, with the idea that language compels us. and forms a bridge between them all.

Mathematics is everywhere, in all countries, in all cultures, at all times

Mathias Enard

your title To the desert is it both an allusion to the character of the deserter and, conversely, to those who, like Paul, refuse to forsake?
Just as these stories are opposites in terms of writing and complement each other in a seemingly interconnected way, we explore Paul Heideber’s obsession with not letting go while also staying true to his love until the end. like his values, his beliefs, his vision of the world, despite exile and the Cold War, which is only possible because others betray him. Our greatest obligation exists only because others around us are abandoning us. If Paul’s world is so perfect, it’s because everything around him is a lie, like East Germany…

Talking about East Germany was important to you.
Even more so, perhaps, because the younger generations have lost the memory of what the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, and the division of the world were. And that this still works today in Germany, but also in Russia, these fragments of the communist utopia that have been turned into a machine to crush people. Today we forget how much this brought dreams and hopes. The war in Ukraine reactivated all of this, showing that beyond the displayed discourse, which is of the Cold War, the past of the Second World War is being renewed. In the speech of Putin and his associates, we have roughly the Great Patriotic War and the glorious Red Army standing against the Nazis and the Ukrainian Scoobies. The destruction of real history in order to re-invent history at will and legitimize current actions is characteristic of totalitarian regimes…

This way, To the desert doesn’t that look like a war memorial? ?
Yes, as in many books, but with this peculiarity that I spent a lot of time in Berlin and the former East Germany, and it is interesting to see that traces of the past are changing and that, at the same time, Geography, of course, from an urban point of view, but also from a cultural and remains politically marked by a border that still exists and that we can still see. The book raises the question of how we organize memory. we have museumized the German concentration camps, making them great symbols of the communist resistance, never mentioning that they were also later used for the regime’s prisoners… What to do with these traces, after all? History proves to be very fragile, always threatening to be carried away by the flow of time, events and circumstances. Therefore, moreover, the fact that the conference on Paul Heideber is organized by boat…

“To the desert»by Matthias Enard, Éditions Actes Sud, 256 page, 21.80 €.