Mathias Enard paddles his childhood river in search of a vanished love
In 'Hôtel Balkan', the 2015 Goncourt winner follows the Sèvre Niortaise of his youth, weaving in the poet Agrippa d'Aubigné and the memory of a woman once loved in Sarajevo, reports Le Temps.
Mathias Enard, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2015 for 'Boussole', returns with 'Hôtel Balkan', a book that Le Temps describes as a hedonistic travel narrative built around a canoe trip down the Sèvre Niortaise, the modest river of the author's childhood in western France. The journey begins near the village of La Mothe-Saint-Héray.
According to the newspaper, the book is less a Sunday outing than a borderless adventure, moving freely between memory and digression. Enard folds in the 16th-century poet Agrippa d'Aubigné, who is tied to the region, and the recollection of a young woman he once loved in Sarajevo, giving the river voyage a second, more melancholic current beneath its playful surface.
Le Temps situates 'Hôtel Balkan' as a sequel to 'Mélancolie des confins', Enard's 2024 book set in Berlin, and notes that two further volumes are to follow, suggesting a wider project of geographical and personal wandering.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
