Empty Spain is rather empty Europe or even the empty world, turning our backs on what we were to get rid of the last vestiges of humanity integrated with the environment. And so it goes. Well knows a Mathias enard which has made this plot an acidic as well as melancholic and lucid criticism of the future of our civilization. Or perhaps just a fascinating sample of what we were yesterday and today we could not be again.
To work on his doctoral thesis on life in the country today, the ethnographer David Mazon has left Paris to settle for a year in a remote village surrounded by marshes on the west coast of France.
While overcoming the discomforts of the rural world, David makes contact with the colorful locals who frequent the café-colmado to interview them. They are headed by Martial, the mayor gravedigger, and the host of the traditional banquet of the members of the Brotherhood of Gravediggers.
In this gargantuan feast where wines and delicacies go hand in hand with legends, songs and disputes about the future of the funeral service, Death curiously offers them three days of truce. The rest of the year, when the Grim Reaper takes hold of someone, the Wheel of Life throws their soul back into the world, to a future or past time, as an animal or as a human being, so that the Wheel continues to turn.
In this splendid and multifaceted novel, which combines great dose of humor and the well-known erudition of the author, Mathias Enard exhumes the turbulent past and the treasures of his native France through the last millennium of its history, but without losing sight of contemporary fears and with the hope of a tomorrow in which the human being be in harmony with the planet.
You can now buy the novel "The Annual Banquet of the Brotherhood of Gravediggers", by Mathias Enard, here:
The first chapter, the ethnologist's journal, is wonderful. A clueless and naive character, it is a chapter full of humor. Later, the point of view changes towards an omniscient narrator, the style becomes heavy and the characters lose all interest, it is not necessary for them to explain why and what the ethnologist did not see, nor the life of the ancestors. In my case, I only longed for the intrepid researcher's field journal to return to the scene.
Great notes, Jul. Thanks!