The Deserters

This brilliant interlocking diptych from Énard (Compass) begins with a soldier emerging from a battlefield into a nightmarish future. What has become of the world is a mystery, as is the identity of this haunted survivor. The answers may lie in a conference celebrating the work of the late mathematician and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber, held aboard a cruise ship on the inauspicious date of September 11, 2001. In attendance are theorists and intellectuals, each with their own agenda and ax to grind. Chief among them is Heudeber’s daughter, Irina, who’s there to present a paper on the irrational numbers of Persian mystic Nasir al-Dun Tusi. Irina has an ulterior motive: to pry the secret of her father’s life and suicide from his widow, Maja. What ensues is a fervent collage of letters, arguments, and confessions that spans from Buchenwald and the GDR to the fall of the Soviet Union and the Twin Towers. When Énard returns to the lone soldier, he’s seen scaling an unforgiving rock face on the other side of which he discovers another survivor amid the ruins. With an unflinching depiction of civilization’s decline and its dystopic aftermath, Énard builds a great work of art from “the remains, the traces, and the great mourning of the future.” It’s a masterpiece. (May)