The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild: An epic nosh-up

There’s nothing like death to give you an appetite for life. When French gravediggers gather for their annual banquet in Mathias Enard’s magnificent new novel, they banish the ghosts by feasting on a grand, Rabelaisian scale.

Through a meal that takes in innumerable courses, boisterously parodic speeches and industrial quantities of fermented grape juice, Enard guides the reader through a history of eloquence, which runs from Boethius to Bossuet, and a story of the French palate that leaves no dish unturned.

The story of the banquet is the centrepiece of a novel that recounts the experience of a young Parisian ethnographer, David Mazon, who finds himself tasked with carrying out an ethnographic study on the tiny village of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe in western France. Not unsurprisingly, Mazon soon finds himself entangled in the emotional politics of a rural settlement where complexity makes up for size. The longer he stays, the more details crowd his attention.

As a counterpoint to Mazon’s dutiful field study, the narrative slips from medieval romance to modern murder, with the tale of the hamlet being told through the shifting shapes of its inhabitants who effortlessly change from stone to oak to bandit to raven to priest to boar, in Enard’s breathlessly inventive prose.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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Enard is known for the wide geographical reach of novels, such as Zone (2014) and Compass (2017), which travel from Barcelona to Beirut, Algiers to Trieste, Vienna to Damascus and beyond. In The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild the focus shifts from the macroscopic to the microscopic, opening up La Pierre-Saint-Christophe to the relentless fractal curiosity of a writer fascinated by the depths of the infinitely small. The epic nosh-up, hosted by the local undertaker Martial Pouvreau, allows Enard to engage in an alternative history of France, looking to the inexhaustible resources of the provinces rather than to the gilded stories of the metropolis.

[ New books in translation: from autofiction to ingenious invention ]

The challenges for the translator of Enard’s remarkable novel are endless from the rendering of punning proper names to the encyclopeadic survey of French gastronomy and the capture of French dialect speech. Frank Wynne, the prize-winning Irish translator, proves himself more than equal to the task and ensures that, for English-readers, the invitation to the banquet leaves us hungry for more.