![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
sebald_feed) wrote2025-08-11 07:00 pm
Recently Read: Énard & Tawada 2
Once upon a time, in a country far away. . .
Not too long ago, I wrote about Mathias Énard’s The Deserters (2020/2022) and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (2018/2025). Fascinated by both books, albeit for very different reasons, I followed up by reading another novel by each writer. Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants was written ten years earlier than The Deserters and tells the story of when Michelangelo was invited to Constantinople in 1506 to design a bridge that would cross the Golden Horn, connecting Europe with Asia. Entranced by the design challenge, the riches offered, and the opportunity to surpass Leonardo da Vinci (whose design was just rejected), he accepts. The basic outline of the story is true, but in this very brief novel Énard sketches a portrait of mid-career Michelangelo as he deals with the emotional, political, and cultural issues of working under pressure for an all-powerful Sultan in a foreign—and Muslim—country. Énard wants us to see this as a dry run for two years later, when Michelangelo will work for yet another all-powerful figure on another major project, Pope Julius II and the Sistine Chapel.
The book opens with a voice that mysteriously addresses Michelangelo. “You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually, what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude. So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.” This voice belongs to a dancer, singer, and storyteller. Even though Michelangelo encounters this mysterious figure multiple times, he cannot decide on the gender, although he convinces himself the person is a man. “Your arm is hard. Your body is hard. Your soul is hard. Of course you’re not sleeping. I know you were waiting for me. I noticed you looking at me.” The person comes to spend the night with Michelangelo several times. “You’re trembling. You don’t desire me? Then listen. Once upon a time, in a country far away. . .” Throughout his stay in Constantinople, Michelangelo resists the tempting dancer, who seems to know his heart and his state of mind so well.
Most of the time in Battles, Kings & Elephants, Énard writes relatively simple sentences. Because this is a book about a great artist, it is a deeply observant type of writing. Michelangelo makes a long list of the spices he sees in the marketplace and then he daydreams of the types of stone he can use for his sculptures: “cipolin, ophite, sarrancolin, serpentine, canela, delfino, porphyry, brocatello, obsidian, marble from Cinna. So many names, colors, materials, whereas the most beautiful, the only one worth anything, is white, white, white without veins, grooves or colorations.” But every now and then, Énard gives us a few sentences full of strange names, a bit of mystery, pomp, and erudition, sentences which stand out for the sheer exuberance of the images they conjure up. “The Ottoman delegation is made up of a young page, a man from Genoa named Falachi, and a squad of janissaries wearing crimson turbans. They settle the sculptor in a grey and gold araba with a dashing harness; two spahis trot in front of the procession, to make way; their scimitars bump against the horses’ flanks.”
More than anything, Énard wants to transport the reader to faraway, exotic places. The dancer tells Michelangelo: “I know that men are children who chase away their despair with anger, their fear with love; they respond to the void by building castles and temples. They cling to stories, they shove them in front of them like banners; everyone makes some story his own so as to attach himself to the crowd that shares it. You conquer people by telling them of battles, kings, elephants, and marvelous beings; by speaking to them about the happiness they will find” This is Énard’s formula.
Ω
“The stars stay where they are, and talk to us from there-bear.”
When we last left Hiruko and her coterie of a half dozen characters from across the globe, they were determined to travel to Copenhagen to visit Susanoo in his hospital room and support his efforts to regain the ability to speak. The trilogy’s overarching quest, which is to find someone who can speak Japanese with Hiruko now that the entire country of Japan has sunk beneath the ocean due to climate change, remains, but has been put on hold. Like its predecessor, Scattered All Over the Earth, Suggested in the Stars is narrated in turn by the book’s various characters. It opens with an intriguing new character, Munun, a dishwasher in the hospital where Susanoo is being treated. To amuse himself, he sometimes stops “to look at the patterns on the dirty plates. . . [and] wonder what the patients had for lunch.” To help overcome their stuttering, he and his co-worker Vita use a special language that they have invented in which they occasionally throw in a rhyme, “to make things easier.”
“We can’t read-weed, can we?”
“Yes we can-pan.”
“Munun, can you read the newspaper-caper?”
“I can read the plates-mates. Plates-mates and the paper-caper. And I can read the moon-loon. The moon-loon and the paper-caper.”
“The moon-loon isn’t out yet.”
“When the night-tight comes, the moon-loon will rise.”
“Where does the moon-loon come from?”
“I don’t know-toe. We come from faraway too.”
“What about the stars-mars?”
“The stars stay where they are, and talk to us from there-bear.”
But after Munun’s initial turn at narration, the life seems to whoosh out of the book and much of the charm of the first volume dissipates. There are no Smilephones or digital genomoney to remind us we are supposed to be in an inventive world of the near future. The idealism that figured so large in Hiruko’s group has given way to travel woes, conversations about practical matters, and apparently pointless digressions.
Dr. Velmer, the man in charge of helping Susanoo recover, understands that he is “a world-weary, cranky old man.” Nevertheless, he is madly in love with Inga, a nurse, who shares his passion for IKEA. They both pride themselves on being able to accurately name any piece of IKEA furniture. Velmer is a worn-out caricature of the snooty physician who yells at the nurses and hospital staff over the smallest issues. And, in the claustrophobic universe of Yoko Tawada’s trilogy, Inga is also the mother of Knut, a member of Hiruko’s coterie and the sponsor of the college education of yet another coterie member, Nanook. Together, Velmer and Inga make a tiresome pair of central characters in Suggested.
Suggested in the Stars feels like a book without a purpose. The gathering in Copenhagen is thwarted by transportation problems that only lead to long digressions. Nanook decides to hitchhike from Trier to Copenhagen (not for climate change reasons, but for preference), which takes him on multiple rides and a zig-zagging trip far off the direct route. Meanwhile, Nora and Akash run into an airport strike and are forced to make the trip on the backs of two motorcycles. By the time that everyone gathers in Susanoo’s hospital room, petty arguments and tensions fill page after page with little respite.
But then, with less than twenty pages to go in the book, Munun, the delightful dishwasher, returns as narrator and some of the magic returns to the book. He enters the room with a radio that is playing music, and slowly everyone begins to dance in a circle. All of the recent hostilities and tribulations are magically forgiven and forgotten. A tiny robot and teddy bear appear and begin handing out tickets for Hiruko and her coterie to take a cruise ship to India and then to points east. To find Japan? Who knows? Munun then invites everyone into his tiny bedroom in the half-basement of the hospital, where he has rigged up a planetarium by making holes in his window curtain with a hole punch. As a going-away present, he gives everyone leaving on the cruise a symbolic star that suggests something about their personality. In 2026, we will get the third volume of the trilogy. But, alas, Munun and Vita, the two most vibrant characters of volume two, did not receive cruise tickets from the tiny robot.
Mathias Énard. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants. Fitcarraldo Editions, 2018. Translated by Charlotte Mandell from the 2010 French original.
Yoko Tawada. Suggested in the Stars. New Directions, 2024, Translated from the 2020 Japanese original by Margaret Mitsutani.