{"id":268866,"date":"2009-02-25T14:44:41","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T14:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/02\/25\/zone-reviewed-in-the-quarterly-conversation\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:19","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:19","slug":"zone-reviewed-in-the-quarterly-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/02\/25\/zone-reviewed-in-the-quarterly-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Zone reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re publishing Mathias \u00c9nard’s Zone<\/em> next year, and I couldn’t be more excited. There’s a review of it up now at The Quarterly Conversation<\/a>, and while it’s not a wholly positive review, the review just makes me happier to be publishing it. Zone<\/em> is definitely an Open Letter book:<\/p>\n

\n

Zone<\/em> doesn\u2019t seduce so much as it makes its reader uncomfortable and sets her mind to work. In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker wrote an alternative history of World War II that led the reader to disturbing what-ifs. \u00c9nard too writes an alternative history of his zone: through the mind of Francis Servain, he makes us see what we tend to forget and, sometimes, what lies ahead. Zone<\/em> is history of literature as well as history of the Mediterranean, although there is no lesson or philosophy behind all this. It\u2019s an admission of human failure. In spite of the book\u2019s many weaknesses it is a powerful read, a novel for the ages, because what is inside will probably never be out of date and will always somewhat enlighten the reader\u2019s view of the times she lives in. (It remains to be seen whether it will work on an American reader, one likely much less familiar with most of what happens in the Mediterranean zone.) Francis is sure his journey is toward the end of the world, and Zone<\/em> is an end of the world novel that knows precisely that this is actually not the end of the world. This might very well be the crudest joke, the most gruesome story narrated here by Mathias \u00c9nard: it is not over.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re publishing Mathias \u00c9nard’s Zone next year, and I couldn’t be more excited. There’s a review of it up now at The Quarterly Conversation, and while it’s not a wholly positive review, the review just makes me happier to be publishing it. Zone is definitely an Open Letter book: Zone doesn\u2019t seduce so much as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2136,20346,16976,8536,1646],"class_list":["post-268866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-ejvl","tag-francois-monti","tag-mathias-enard","tag-quarterly-conversation","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313636,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268866\/revisions\/313636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}