Mathias Enard's New Novel Draws Comparisons to Kafka's Ghostly Hunter

Diacritik has published a review of a new work by Mathias Enard, titled Anatomie de la mélancolie, under the heading 'Hôtel Balkan'. The piece, posted on 15 September, opens by comparing the book to Franz Kafka's short story 'The Hunter Gracchus', in which a huntsman who died long ago remains adrift, unable to reach the afterlife, aboard a funeral boat that never lands.

Enard, the author of Boussole and Zone, has become one of the more closely watched names of the French literary autumn, and this new title arrives as part of this year's rentrée littéraire, according to Diacritik. Beyond the opening allusion to Kafka's melancholic wanderer, the review summary available to this desk does not detail the book's plot, structure or publisher, so those particulars cannot be confirmed here.

The image invoked by the reviewer — a man neither dead nor alive, carried along by a boat with no destination — sets a tone of drifting and mourning that the title, Anatomie de la mélancolie, appears to echo directly, gesturing also toward Robert Burton's seventeenth-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, though Diacritik's text does not spell out that connection explicitly.

Readers who follow Enard's work will likely want to watch for further coverage as more details of the book, and its reception during this year's rentrée, become available.