Beautiful ( )

"Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it – the drinkers, the poets, the lovers…
You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude.
So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.”

The author, Mathias Enard, takes fragments of known history and actual documents and weaves them into a fictionalized tale of the sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Frustrated to the point of rage with Pope Julius II, who has failed to provide him funds for his commission to build the papal tomb, Michelangelo accepts an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople, The Great Turk, to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Promised great glory and exorbitant payment, Michelangelo travels to Constantinople, where he isolates himself, knowing nothing of the language or culture, while struggling to achieve inspiration for a bridge design. He is assigned a translator, a page, and the secretary-poet, Mesihi, to see to his needs. Enard portrays Michelangelo as brilliant, yet unwashed, self-absorbed, anxious and fearful, and prone to bouts of fury, while also captivated by the city’s architecture. The story of his efforts to design a bridge is ultimately overshadowed by intertwining narratives of his obsession with a mysterious, androgynous singer-dancer, Mesihi’s unspoken, selfless love for Michelangelo, and a dangerous, unsuspected conspiracy.

This is a short, suspenseful novel that is beautifully written. Every word feels carefully chosen. Its characters are masterfully drawn and while largely fictional, the plot feels imaginable. The mainly third-person narrative is occasionally interspersed with the first-person thoughts of the androgynous singer, in language and rhythms almost like poetry. I found this to be a spellbinding read, not for the importance of any themes, but simply for the superb writing.

The scarce documentation that supports Michelangelo’s time in Constantinople includes the Sultan’s invitation, a design sketch for the Golden Horn bridge, a list of the possessions he left behind upon his return to Florence, and letters to his brother and an architect friend. The Grand Turk and his Vizier, Ali Pasha, were real people, as was Mesihi of Prishtina.

[Street of Thieves] is the only other work I have read by Enard. This book felt to me like an entirely different author. I know that some do not care for fiction based on historical figures, but I highly recommend this book.

Not up to the standards of Compass, but perfectly readable and intelligent on the question of art and power; it actually got me interested in Michaelangelo, which isn't nothing. The disastrous trash of Street of Thieves does show up here, in the extended 'love' scenes; someone needs to tell Enard that he can't and shouldn't try to write romance or sex. If he just stuck to history, ideas, and emotions, he'd be fantastic. Luckily, there's enough of the latter here to keep me engaged, and to nudge me back towards trying Zone. ( )

The very nice founder of The Republic of Consciousness Prize, @neilgriffiths, recently tweeted that Mathias Enard was ‘the most important writer of fiction in the world’ so I thought I had better take a look. I decided to ease myself in via his novella Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (Fitzcarraldo), which is translated from. The original French by Charlotte Mandell. Enard studied Arabic and Persian, and here he pieces together archive material; Michelangelo is drawn to Constantinople, despite papal disapproval, to succeed where Leonardo da Vinci failed, and design a bridge to cross the Bosporus. I really enjoyed this sojourn and now will upgrade to Enard’s Zone, which Griffiths describes as ‘the most serious work of fiction of *all time*’. Gulp. ( )

I really enjoyed this. I have all of Enard's translated-to-English books in my TBR, and this is the first I've read, so I didn't have his other novels as points of comparison.

The story, such as it is, imagines Michelangelo's 1506 trip to Constantinople at the request of the Sultan, who wants him to build a bridge across the Bosphorus. Currently at outs with Pope Julius and hearing that Leonardo has been unsuccessful in the same endeavor, Michelangelo accepts. He eventually produces a design that finds favor, but there are mysterious forces conspiring against him.

Enard combines events in the historical record (M did go to Constantinople and make a sketch of such a bridge) with fiction (M's interactions with various people in the city). The chapters are very short and the story is told in fragments. What worked really well for me was the way Enard portrayed the effects of being in a new, unfamiliar culture which M was hostile to but also fascinated by. He is very much the ignorant minority (despite being an artist of immense talent), and the narrative depicts Ottoman culture and politics as sophisticated and formidable. In my reading at least, there was none of the exoticization or condescension that you sometimes get in these kinds of accounts.

It's a short novel, a novella really, but suffused with complexity. ( )