Mathias Énard

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

Notify me when the book’s added
To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate. How do I upload a book?
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.
This book is currently unavailable
515 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2023
Publication year
2023
Translator
Frank Wynne
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)