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The Time of Return

Mathias énard gathers the threads of history Library of Congress

The Deserters by Mathias énard. New Directions, 192 pages. 2025.

On or about February 2025, the twentieth century ended. Rarely does the beginning or close of an epoch align precisely with its calendar dates; it takes time for the years to settle into the exact note, the timbre, of what is to come. When Virginia Woolf wrote that in 1910 “human character changed,” she was ushering in a century that, in the winter of this year, as a new American political administration began to clumsily, brutally assert its power, has now seemingly concluded on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving in its stead an ever-tensing shift in human relations not seen since the years before World War I.

To some, this is a good thing. The other day while reading the news, I came across a quotation from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who told a reporter from the Washington Postthat Trump’s April tariffs would “create an environment where we’re back to where we were before World War I.” That is when Trump believed “we were the strongest economy in the world.” I had to double-check the date as I read this, to make sure that this was, indeed, the figure I was seeing, the Iinstead of the II—the so-called Great War. Time may move inexorably forward, but history seems to have a way of repeating itself.

In the realm of literature—always more slow-moving than the headlines—a number of writers have turned their attention in recent years to the ways in which the two centuries seem to mirror one another. Call them the inheritors of Sebald: with their meditative and backward-glancing books, writers like Teju Cole, Olga Tokarczuk, Da?a Drndi?, Benjamín Labatut, Georgi Gospodinov, and more write with a magpie eye toward history, creating literature out of handfuls of dust. In The Deserters, the French writer Mathias énard’s latest novel, translated by Charlotte Mandell, we see the latest variation of this theme. Composed of two narrative strands twisting—but never crossing—around each other, The Desertersis unusual in the way it takes a certain American event—9/11—and places it within the context of other periods of historical rupture. The questions it raises are broad: Does history merely repeat itself, or can cycles be broken? Can we escape history, or are we forever at its mercy? By evoking 9/11 alongside the Yugoslav wars of the nineties and Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, énard is able to explore the tensions of a seeming contradiction: that a certain era of world history—and this includes America’s place within it—is over. For good. And yet: how familiar this moment appears, the sound and shape of it. How closely it repeats syllables of the past.

“We had just changed centuries, millennia,” recalls Irina, the narrator of the book’s second of two alternating sections. She is looking back to the academic conference she attended on a date that began ordinary and quickly became a turning point: September 11, 2001. Irina is a historian, “someone who has chosen not to sit facing forward,” and the daughter of the (fictional) East German mathematician, poet, and concentration camp survivor Paul Heudeber—who brings to mind twentieth-century writers such as Primo Levi and Paul Celan—on whom the conference is being held. “The present,” as the day begins, in a wonderful phrase, “was swaying, from one foot to the other, like someone hearing alluring music and wondering whether to dance. All the threads of History seemed gathered today in a single hand.”

Certain days are marked out by time, by fate, as significant even as they are being lived, in real time, rather than only appearing so in hindsight. This is the guiding principle of Irina’s sections of the novel, written from her perspective as she recalls the conference, revisits letters between her father Paul and her mother, as well as, toward the book’s end, her more recent past as she walks through contemporary Weimar. In every part of Irina’s section, the violence of previous generations seeps through. Through her memories of her father, Buchenwald and other Nazi Germany concentration camps are evoked. At the conference, a young Bosnian academic named Alma Sejdi?gives a speech about mathematics and violence in Paul Heudeber’s work, their “concentration of pain and solitude” reminding her “of what I myself had experienced during the war. . . . thanks to the [Buchenwald] ConjecturesI could look my trauma in the face, it had become an analyzable, external object.” Meanwhile, “the Towers were also invading the restaurant dining room . . . via a television that, in the midst of this rather pretentious space (carpets, tablecloths, lace, candlesticks, waitresses with embroidered aprons), seemed to connote a tunnel in space-time joining Schinkel’s early nineteenth-century Prussia with a futurist city in the grip of the Apocalypse.” Time collapses. Events are named, remembered, and then blur together.

Déja vu permeates the book. Names and places have a way of recurring; the conference on Heudeber, for instance, is takes place on a cruise hosted by the University of Potsdam, Potsdam of course being the location of the 1945 Potsdam conference that negotiated the end of World War II. The surname of the translator of Heudeber’sConjecturesis Kant; Irina describes the days leading up to the 2001 conference with the Walter Benjamin-associated phrase “under the sign of Saturn.” The novel ends in the spring of 2022 as Irina dwells on civilians killed in a Ukrainian train station by a Russian missile.

By comparison, the other half of The Desertersfeels suspended, outside of and without time. It follows a nameless soldier in an unspecified war as he wanders through an unknown country, attempting to flee from the violence. The landscape and time are generic; this could be central Europe in World War II, Bosnia in 1992, or Iraq during the American invasion in 2003. The anonymity of the soldier and his actions are the entire point. The violence of every war is shocking and yet, to an extent, a repetition—familiar. One might think, then, that some kind of overlap might occur between the novel’s two sections, the soldier revealed to be someone with a connection to Irina, or vice versa, but no. There is no narrative thread tying these stories together. But something else connects them, something more mysterious, in the same way that real life sometimes links people, events, or locations together: the claustrophobia of time. The effect is one of the past looping in on itself, closing in on itself; a sense of regression infuses every action and page. Observes the soldier: “War has returned you to the savagery and solitude of childhood.”

The Desertersis not énard’s first book to explore a relatively recent war, or to run through a dense trajectory of historical events and references over the course of its pages. His 2008 novel Zone, for instance (also translated into English by Mandell), unfurls in one long sentence the thoughts of a man, Francis Mirkovi?, as he takes a train to the Vatican. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Mirkovic was a member of a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s and freely partook in a multitude of war crimes, grappling in the present with feelings of shame, guilt, and horror at his memories. Compass(again translated by Mandell) follows a Viennese musicologist’s train of thought over the course of an insomniac night as he mentally sifts through his own memories, the history of Orientalism, and the relationship between the West and the Middle East. In a 2018 interview published by Granta, énard, who spent ten years studying in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, points to this experience as being fundamental to his growth as a writer: “Getting to know contemporary authors, novelists, poets, many of whom were not translated, are still not translated, into European languages—it was very important to get a proper eye, a proper view of things, a proper sense of what literature means.” In some ways, The Deserters is a continuation of several strands that have often appeared in énard’s work: the act of warfare and its lasting consequences, the fraught relationship between the West and East.

My own experiences of the East are limited but resonant; I spent most of the summer of 2022 in Bosnia and Serbia, living with a companion who was originally from Sarajevo. Until traveling to the region, I wrote in my journal, I had not fully understood its importance, how it contained the history of the twentieth century writ large, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that launched World War I to its mid-century transition into Yugoslavia under the Communists to the dissolution of that utopianism into the bloody ethno-nationalisms of the 1992 war. While I was there, I read the whole of the British writer Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her 1941 account of traveling through the region, and I understood why her manuscript spiraled into a thousand pages. In an artist’s squat in Belgrade, I met a woman who worked part-time at the House of Flowers, the mausoleum of Josip Broz Tito, the country’s former president, where she later invited me for a tour. When I mentioned to her that I was reading West’s book, she laughed. “Americans are always reading that,” she said. Implicit in her observation was that Americans seemed to think that this book might offer a clue as to better understanding the contradictions, the complexities of the region. But this was a part of the problem: part of the mythos, the allure, of this region for the Westerner is the idea that, try as we might—no matter how many books we read, or visits we take—we’ll never truly understand.

I had never felt so foreign in a place, I had never felt like such an outsider. Arriving in the Balkans felt like entering another zone, a space in which all the years seemed to overlap. This is a cliché, repeated all over Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but it was also true. Conversations in both Sarajevo and Belgrade revolved around a very particular timeline, the years before and after the war. Those words, the war, the war, the phrase itself a focal point. Of course it was, how could it not be? This was all recent history. When I took notes in my notebook, I worried that I was portraying it unfairly. That I was hewing to an expected narrative. What I realized, upon coming back to New York, was that something about this area of the world, this place of dissolving borders, multiple religions, the shifting mirage of empires, held a key to understanding what was going on in the world at large. The key, I suppose, was the idea of repeating patterns. The headlines kept returning to it, as did the novels I was reading from all sorts of writers: énard, yes, but also Gospodinov, the winner of the 2023 International Booker, and many more. The cycles were not breaking, but were instead continuing. And this time, the Trump administration was getting involved: a Trump official charged with dismantling USAID, ProPublica reported in February, was once caught in a secret meeting with pro-Russian Serb separatists in the Balkans attempting to restart the nineties wars.

“How happy she was that the twentieth century was over,” Irina’s mother, Maja, tells her daughter, “how happy she was to see Europe progressing and how ardently she wished the twenty-first century would never experience the horrors of the preceding century.” The irony is sharp, and speaks to the essential tension of The Deserters, the fact that its twining storylines never meet. Even by the book’s end, resolution eludes the characters. Maja might be happy that the twentieth century is over, but she is wrong that the world is progressing, or that the horrors may not repeat themselves.

When the 9/11 attacks occur in The Deserters, it is a moment in which daily life speeds up and becomes history, fusing the present with the past. “Above all a part of our faith had collapsed with the towers,” recalls Irina, “our faith in a kind of peace, of reparation, was crumbling away; already during the previous decade the wars in Yugoslavia had tinged with red the joy of the fall of the Wall; Europe had averted its eyes.” It’s not very funto live through history—it’s fairly awful, in fact. And it is an experience that unfolds on our television sets and our phone screens; we are live witnesses to it daily. The Desertersends with a literal fork in the road, a choice of direction for Irina. For us in real life, there is no choice at present; that belongs to the past.