Boussole

Born in Niort in 1972, a scholar of Arabic and Persian (INALCO), trained at the École du Louvre, translator and inveterate traveler now based in Barcelona, Mathias Enard has built, book after book, a body of work devoted to openness: La Perfection du tir (2003), Zone (2008), which embraces the twentieth-century Mediterranean (prix Décembre, prix du Livre Inter), and Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’éléphants (2010), which won the Goncourt des lycéens. With Boussole, he sought to “fight against the simplistic and fantasized image of an enemy Orient” by recalling everything Europe owes to it — and still owes it today.

Dedicated “to the Syrians,” Boussole answers caricatures of “the Orient” by showing, very concretely, the tangle of exchanges, admirations and misunderstandings that weave together the shared history of East and West.

Its crowning by the Académie Goncourt brought Actes Sud its third such honor, after Laurent Gaudé (Le Soleil des Scorta, 2004) and Jérôme Ferrari (Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, 2012).

Publisher’s wraparound band preserved.