A walk through history and across borders

Anthropologist Lorenzo Alunni introduces Mathias Énard by saying that if his novels were a painting they would be a huge, marvelous fresco with incredibly disparate figures, yet at the same time extremely coherent. There would be a train going to Milan from Rome (like in Zone), a sniper (The Perfection of the Sniper), Michelangelo showing his design for a bridge to Sultan Bayezid (Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants), a window in Vienna where a man named Franz Ritter is observing himself and thinking of Persia (Compass). At the bottom, the paint still fresh, we'd see the streets of Berlin, and among the many characters we'd recognize one in particular: Énard himself.

After years of choral novels where he hid behind the lives of his characters, for the first time Énard now becomes the protagonist. His most recent book, Melancholy of Borders, is the first piece of an announced tetralogy dedicated to the cardinal points. Starting north, Énard sets the narrative in Berlin, which becomes the co-protagonist. “Berlin is a place where history constantly passes under your window, with borders inside it that are now physically erased, but not from memory”.

It was there, in the summer of 2015, that a close friend was suddenly struck by a severe stroke. After that, the proximity of death became something deeply real for him. That autumn, as she was recovering in the Beelitz clinic — a ruined 19th-century sanatorium south of Berlin — Énard walked to visit her. If the author and Berlin are the main characters, that walk is the plot. “I realized that almost all my books have to do with the journey, the movement of a character or narrator from one space to another”, Énard says. Walking alone became his method for writing, allowing memories and poetic fragments to surface. During that particular gloomy walk, a verse by Peruvian poet Blanca Varela came to his mind: “Where it ends... open your wings.”

This tension between endings and new possibilities defines the book’s borders. Énard explores borders both as concrete, violent frontlines and as invisible, existential rifts within ourselves. In a world where war feels like the natural human state, looking to the future has become terrifying. Instead, Énard suggests, this melancholy serves as a protective refuge, offering readers a profound, almost joyous consolation.