Enard's Gravediggers' Banquet - Too Much of Everything

"The wheel turns. It carries all beings from death to birth and birth back to death - always painful. From the bloody hands of midwives to the long faces of gravediggers. Toward earth or fire. No escape from Fate."

Turns out Mathias Enard is basically my neighbor. He lives in Deux-Sèvres, right next to my Charente Maritime. And this time, he's ditched the exotic locales he usually writes about for something completely different - a rural French epic set right here in our backyard.

The setup: David Mazon, young ethnologist working on his thesis about 21st-century rural life, moves to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe for a year. It's a tiny village in Deux-Sèvres, near the Marais Poitevin. His mission? Interview the locals. The mayor - who also happens to be the town gravedigger - introduces him around. David meets farmers whose families have been there for generations, an eccentric artist, a British couple, a perpetually grumpy bar owner, hunters, card players. The whole cast.

The first chapter is David's journal. He's this enthusiastic, naive Parisian researcher who fancies himself the Lévi-Strauss of rural Poitou. He discovers the reality of country living: worms in the bathroom, zero public transport, crushing winter boredom.

But here's where it gets interesting - and complicated. David and his thesis quickly become background noise. Enard pulls this clever trick: he uses reincarnation theory as a narrative device. Every being - human, animal, plant - keeps reincarnating into something else after death. It's brilliant on paper.

What you get is half meditation on life and death (funny and melancholic), half whirlwind tour through centuries of regional history. We're talking Clovis to Napoleon. Crusades to Religious Wars. Poitiers to La Rochelle to Niort to Rochefort. It's a colorful fresco that genre-hops constantly, climaxing with the gravediggers' feast - a Rabelaisian banquet scene so rich you gain three pounds just reading it.

Look, I want to tell you I loved this. I really do. But I struggled hard with this book. Almost quit halfway through because it felt bloated to me. The only reason I pushed on? The author's name is Mathias Enard.

I genuinely admire the stylistic gymnastics here. Jumping from one era to another within a single sentence takes skill. The erudition is impressive - history, geography, natural history, gastronomy, witchcraft, poetry, folklore, all woven together.

But there's too much. Too much of everything. The result reads like an overly sweet pastry that looks gorgeous but makes you sick. I wanted to love it. I respect the craft. But it exhausted me.

Published by Actes Sud, 2025. 432 pages.