France's top book prize goes to tale of opium-fuelled dream

[ucrdem]

AFP - 4 Nov 2015 at 00:40


French author Mathias Enard poses with his book "Boussole" (Compass) next to French authors Philippe Claudel (L) and Regis Debray at the Drouant restaurant in Paris after he was awarded with the Goncourt Prize on November 3, 2015


PARIS - A book about a night of opium-fuelled cross-cultural dreaming won France's most prestigious -- and lucrative -- literary prize Tuesday in a contest dominated by the West's fraught relationship with Islam.

Mathias Enard took the Goncourt prize with "Boussole" ("Compass&quot , a poetic eulogy to the long history of cultural exchanges between East and West that flies in the face of cliches about the so-called clash of civilisations.

The novel runs the course of a night of opium-induced ruminations, and in the spirit of his high-flown odyssey, its burly author told a scrum of reporters that Lebanon's patron saint and the ghost of Algeria's most revered Islamic thinker may have had a hand in his victory.

"I have just come back from Algiers and Beirut," said Enard, 43, a scholar of both Arabic and Persian. "Maybe it was the luck that Sheikh Abderrahmane (a historian who died in 2010) and Saint George of Beirut brought me...

"I am extraordinarily happy," he added, after fighting his way into the Paris restaurant where the prize was decided over lunch by the Goncourt's jury, who are all elected for life.

The novel has already won the booksellers' prize -- the Nancy-Le Point -- for its nimbly erudite voyage from the Islamic enlightenment of the Middle Ages to present day Islamic State executioners in war-torn Syria.

Although Enard had been the clear critics' favourite, the daring and density of his writing -- the opening sentence lasts a page -- put others off.

The head of the jury, Bernard Pivot said after the award: "You have to be audacious to write a book like this, and you also have to be audacious to read it."

But the Barcelona-based Enard insisted his book was "very accessible... I write very simply. All you have to do is open the book to realise that it not as hard to read as some say."

An academic who has lived in Tehran, Berlin and Beirut, where his breakthrough novel "Zone" (2008) is set, Enard also won France's second most lucrative prize, the youth Goncourt, in 2010.

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