Wednesday, July 24, 2024

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

 by Mathias Enard

This was a book that is hard to categorise. It starts and ends with David Mazon who is supposedly carrying out fieldwork for his Phd in anthropology in the west of France in a small village that is struggling with all the problems of rural France. His diary entries are very funny. However, not much work on his thesis gets done. The central sections of the book are crazy as we explore the interaction of the wheel of life and its impact on the inhabitants past and future of the village. In the middle of this we have the banquet of the gravediggers which is magnificently described and dotted with stories and speeches by those in attendance.

My biggest gripe with this book which was published by Fitzcarraldo, is the glaring typos throughout the book where words are duplicated or appear in the wrong order. Dreadful.

As for the book itself I enjoyed this madcap trip 9/10 

No comments: