Overview

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around restlessly on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language, presided over by the village mayor. Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess - and a paradoxically macabre paean to life's inexhaustible richness.

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9781804270592

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Reviews

'Rarely has a book about death been so joyful.... With The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild, Mathias Enard offers up both the most excessive and the most consolatory novel written in a long time.' - Florence Buchy, Le Monde 'Although his focus here is on the Poitevin marshes, Mathias Enard remains above all an explorer who is peerless in his ability to join together places, cultures and epochs, always returning to love, to death and to what they can generate together.' - Baptiste Liger, Lire 'A baroque, Rabelaisian tale.... Mathias Enard's pen and unbridled imagination lead the saraband, the bacchanalia, until we've had our fill.' - Thierry Clermont, Le Figaro 'A wonderfully unclassifiable novel. Contemporary, historical, comical, truculent, poetic, with elements of the diary, the fable, the short story... The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is shot through with Mathias Enard's deep love of literature.' - Muriel Mingaud, Centre France

‘Rarely has a book about death been so joyful.... With The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, Mathias Enard offers up both the most excessive and the most consolatory novel written in a long time.’ — Florence Buchy, Le Monde ‘Although his focus here is on the Poitevin marshes, Mathias Enard remains above all an explorer who is peerless in his ability to join together places, cultures and epochs, always returning to love, to death and to what they can generate together.’ — Baptiste Liger, Lire ‘A baroque, Rabelaisian tale.... Mathias Enard’s pen and unbridled imagination lead the saraband, the bacchanalia, until we've had our fill.’ — Thierry Clermont, Le Figaro ‘A wonderfully unclassifiable novel. Contemporary, historical, comical, truculent, poetic, with elements of the diary, the fable, the short story... The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is shot through with Mathias Enard’s deep love of literature.’ — Muriel Mingaud, Centre France

Author Information

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix litteraire de la Porte Doree and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is his fifth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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