What a surprise: One would have expected this novel by Mathias Énard on the Mediterranean, in Barcelona, Venice, Istanbul, perhaps still in the bridge city of Vienna, somewhere where the Orient and Occident meet, but “The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger” plays shortly the Atlantic coast. An urban setting also seemed typical to the loyal reader - and yeah, we're stranded in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe: Ironically, the cosmopolitan Énard enriches French literature with a novel about life between the farm and angler's café, swamp and field, terrine and Liquor. Country life, however, is not an end in itself, Énard's alchemy transforms it into the universal: “The Annual Banquet” is a cosmic work about food and love, about death and reincarnation, about the all-digesting and sublimating power of language.
The Pampa des Bas-Poitou approaches Énard via a ruse: he sends David Mazon there, almost thirty, budding ethnologist, whose doctoral thesis is supposed to be “a real monograph on rural life”.
The distant but good-willed look of the somewhat clumsy newcomer allows Énard a cautious approach, the gradual shedding of various prejudices.
David's field diary provides the framework, the first and the last of seven chapters.
The disadvantage of a limited external view is compensated for in the inner chapters: a quasi-divine narrator opens a panorama show that spans centuries.
In the middle of the novel is the central scene, the report of the annual banquet of the gravedigger.
Finally, there are five “chansons” as insertions between the chapters.
A Buddhist novel?
David offers a quick start. He is a pretentious yet lovable misfire of science: You follow his year-long development from a failed doctoral student to a satisfied organic farmer, from the horny lover of the Parisian Lara to the partner of Lucie Moreau, a woman in her mid-thirties "in the hippie country look". The latter is a central figure in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe: Of the other 648 souls in this village, Lucie's grandfather and his tragic life story, Lucie's handicapped cousin Arnaud (a car mechanic and anniversaries worshiper), Thomas as the mean and lustful host of the angler Cafés, the mayor and undertaker Martial, Mathilde and Gary, both farmers and landlords of David, the artist Max, with whom David befriends, and his lover Lynn,a hairdresser and Lucie's best friend.
The staff is expanded to include ancestors - and previous incarnations of the characters. Because Énard writes a Buddhist novel: “When the very self-confident anthropologist David Mazon in disgust poured half a bottle of Javel water over the red annelids that populated his bathroom, he did not know that he was sending the souls of sinister murderers back to the wheel of life Page Marseil Sabourin, guillotined in 1894, little Chaigneau, guillotined in 1943, plus the illustrious executioners Deibler and Desfourneaux, who with their acts of violence had all traded suffering and blind crawling in the wet for several generations Énard easily accommodates important, sometimes anecdotal figures. Presumably he leads the doctrine of reincarnation - wheel of life,"Clear light" and bardo (the Tibetan interval between existences) included - for purely narrative reasons, because the trick allows him to bring the story of the wider environment into the novel. However, there is a core: the brutal and sad story of Lucie's family.