Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Author(s): Mathias Enard

Novel

In 1506, Michelangelo—a young but already renowned sculptor—is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, along with an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.” Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II—whose commission he leaves unfinished—and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.


Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants—constructed from real historical fragments—is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched fragments, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

In 1506, Michelangelo – a young but already renowned sculptor – is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: ‘You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.’ Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is a thrilling novella about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.


‘Mathias Enard traces a parable about connections between the monotheistic Christian and Muslim faiths, about the many ways mankind has tried to use art and engineering to counter the forces of gravity, and about how people from other lands so often turn out to be less different from us than we realise. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is a short but magical work.’


— Fiammetta Rocco, 1843 


 


‘A historical novel of exquisite beauty.’


— Publishers Weekly


 


‘Necessary – no one writes like Mathias Enard.’


— Francine Prose


 


Praise for Mathias Enard


 


‘A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.’


— Christopher Beha, Harper’s Magazine


 


‘The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.’


— Leo Robson, New Statesman


 


‘All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.’


— Joshua Cohen, New York Times


 


‘The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighbourhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it. Enard speaks Persian and Arabic, and he has taught at universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region, a “zone”, as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine books, three of which have been translated into English, he has charted a course through this zone, writing about sectarian violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism, tradition, and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue’s gallery of thieves, killers, and eccentrics. Enard’s prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (Zone is a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But it’s the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Enard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.’


— Jacob Silverman, New Yorker


 


Praise for Compass


 


‘Few works of contemporary fiction will yield as much pleasure as Compass. Reading it amounts to wandering into a library arranged in the form of an exotic sweet shop, full of tempting fragments of stories guaranteed leaving you wanting more.’


— Eileen Battersby, Irish Times


 


‘Enard has written a masterful novel that speaks to our current, confused moment in history by highlighting the manifold, vital contributions of Islamic and other Middle Eastern cultures to the European canon. More than that, it points toward, as one character puts it, “a new vision that includes the other in the self.”’


— Andrew Ervin, Washington Post


 


‘One of the finest European novels in recent memory.’


— Adrian Nathan West, Literary Review


 


‘In a world that has become afraid of intelligence, Compass – slowly, I imagine, and carefully translated by Charlotte Mandell – is a deeply intelligent novel, a book that I could vanish into forever.’


— Anthony Brown, Time’s Flow Stemmed


 


 


 


Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781910695692
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • : November 2018
  • : {"length"=>["19.7"], "width"=>["12.5"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Mathias Enard
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 843.92
  • : 137