Mathias Énard's magnificent novel COMPASS is one of the finest books we've read all year. The action of COMPASS takes place over one long, sleepless night in the mind of Franz Ritter, a Viennese ethnomusicologist who has has recently been dealt a damning prognosis. His life's work centers on parsing the culture of "the Orient" as it exists in Europe's imagination, an impossible landscape "east of the East of the east" that has become an integral part of Europe's cultural identity. Chapters of the book are demarcated simply by timestamps as Franz meditates on intersections between eastern and western cultures, his myriad regrets, and his decades-old romantic fixation on a longtime colleague, Sarah. Franz's stream-of-consciousness narration lends the text a marvelously immersive quality, and the sheer volume of cultural references woven through his reminiscences makes the project of reading this novel astonishingly rich. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. 🇫🇷 #translatedtuesday #mathiasénard #compass (at Unabridged Bookstore)