In conversation with Mathias Enard about "The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild"

This is a free event, but please note that registration is required.

Please join us for this event with French author Mathias Enard at the Maison Française on Wednesday 1 November at 5.30pm.
Mathias Enard will be in conversation with Catriona Seth (All Souls).

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is his fifth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess - and a paradoxically macabre paean to life's richness.

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-annual-banquet-of-the-gravediggers-guild

This event will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.
To attend, please make sure to register at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/maison-francaise-doxford/t-vvpeolg.