Compass takes place over the course of one, long night during which Franz Ritter, a Viennese musicologist, suffers from a terrible bout of insomnia. The symptoms from his recently diagnosed illness, the memories of an unrequited love, and the dissatisfaction at his mediocre academic career all contribute to his sleepless night. Instead of chapters, Énard uses time stamps to denote the hours that are slowly ticking away as Franz runs through years of memories. Sarah, a French Academic with whom Franz has spent many years in love, sends him an article she has written from Sarawak, in Malaysia, which is her current place of residence. It is unclear at the beginning what Franz and Sarah mean or have meant to each other, but Franz slowly unravels their complicated history throughout the course of his sleepless night.

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell, was shortlisted for the Booker International award in 2017 and yet I only got around to reading it this month. But I’m so glad I did as this is a phenomenally clever and engaging book about a dying man – a musicologist in Vienna called Franz – who spends one lonely night reminiscing about the unrequited love of his life, Sarah. Yet, blended into this sorrow is the yearning he also had for the Middle East and memories of the shared adventures he had in Turkey, Syria and Iran with Sarah.

Written as a stream of Franz’s consciousness, we dive headlong into a world of mesmerising ancient history and dynasties, drugs and thieves, and a fascination that has consumed Europe for centuries. As students of that dangerous term, ‘Orientalism’, together Sarah and Franz explore what this exoticism means, what Europeans have been fascinated by, and what they have dangerously tried to colonise and exploit.

This is a powerful piece of academia wrapped up in a beguiling novel. The travel journal elements are, of course, curious and addictive – I read this when I was in Iraq actually so it was doubly fascinating! – yet it brilliantly brings in evidence of famous figures from history – adventurer’s and musicians, lords and ladies – and it really needles in on the impact such distortion such imagery has on the Middle East.

Edward Said’s work on Orientalism is, of course, a key influence here but it never overtakes or suffocates the story. A book that a reader can undeniably luxuriate in – but one that eventually forces the reader to confront what exactly they have bee luxuriating in.

Very dense and difficult to read. Couldn’t make my way through all of it.

This is a complex book. Beautifully written, but a little meandering and not an easy read.

Hard to love, more to be admired. In some ways a modern Arabian night

Compass is one of those novels that requires high levels of engagement, whose scope of knowledge is scintillating and baffling.
Franz, the narrator, is seriously ill. Set in one sleepless night, we follow his thoughts as he contemplates his mortality and his failed loved life. He has had two obsessions in life: the workings of Oriental music within the European tradition - both Europeans using Oriental motifs or Oriental composers working in Europe - and Sarah.
As he thinks back over the intensity of his times with Sarah, remembers visits to the desert and trips to strange museums like the Museum of Crime, he regrets the past, wonders what he means to her, and considers the possibility of telling her about his feelings and his illness. So far, not even his mother knows he is ill.
He also debates the construction of Orientalism, as well as the construction of Western Europe, both fluctuating ideas requiring the nurture of East and West, commenting on the ways in which new extremism requires the neglect of history and tradition on both sides. He mocks the European desire to take ‘Oriental’ culture for its own, copying its instruments and sometimes literally digging it up and flying it home. In this way, it becomes part essay and has something of a feeling of Montaigne (though much more extended).
The way academic argument and memory merge with dream and the present discomfort of the body, is impressive and at times overwhelming. This is not a novel you can read in idle moments. You need to give it your attention and then you are rewarded with total immersion into Franz’s head, a journey that crosses continents and states of consciousness with elegance and a bitter edge of regret for a life lived so fiercely in the mind rather than in action.
He waits for an email from Sarah ‘a compass pointing always towards the inbox of my email’ and all of the churning thoughts of the night fade into longing with a dawn of hope that you will have to read to discover.
In some ways, I feel like I need a few more degrees to coherently tackle Compass, but it’s a fascinating novel filled with stories and ideas I will definitely go back to.

This book wasn't for me it seemed to be very wordy without actually saying very much. I read about 20 pages and had no idea what the book as about .and I wasn't engaged at all..

A literary journey through the Middle East on a night of nostalgic memories of Franz our insomniac. A tale of his love for Sarah, and their scrapbook of imagery and music, this musicology pair compile an essay of sorts on their tastes and experiences woven together with words. Franz journey from Istanbul, to Palmyra, to Damascus, to Aleppo and then to Tehran is an exploration of eastern music and his emotional attachment to Sarah. However, when Franz and Sarah are suddenly forced to end their travels together in Tehran, Franz licks his wounds and goes home, retreating into himself and his academic career. Sarah is a wanderer and continues her journey and takes the reader to a Buddhist monastery.

It is well written albeit perhaps overly erudite, but in the disjointed style of an insomniacs sleep pattern, thereby illustrating the distraction and disjointed behaviours that can bring.

DFN 26%

Sorry, this book is just wayyy too dense for me, I feel like I've been reading it a long time but I still have no idea what's going on and don't really care either, I can see it's well-written and intelligent, and the author has clearly spent a long time working really hard on it, but that's about the only good thing so far and it's not really enough for me to keep reading when I have so many other books to read. More reason I think for publishers to put up short samples on here for readers to read before they go into something like this.

This book started out as an intriguing read, and it drew me in - but only so far. After a while my attention wandered because we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I gave up reading only about 10% of the way through the book.

Too much... everything. The lack of conciseness when confronting the places this novel is set in distanced me from what was an actually very interesting narrative. Too much time was taken away for descriptions that begun as informative and exciting and ended up needlessly interrupting the story their their length.

Is music different in the East and West? Does it bring us together or tear us apart? Mathias's writes in Compass that although different, the traditions and cultures help us to understand each other and ourselves. Franz, the main character loves music but also likes opium. He finds out he has a serious disease that sets off his inner talking head into the ramblings of a crazy, unfulfilled person. Sounds depressing, but isn't. Wonderfully written, I'd recommend.

This is a complex novel and not an easy read. However, it is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between East and West, looking at how the cultures complement and challenge each other.

I enjoyed the journeys through countries and the travel writing feel of those narratives.

It's not something I would usually read but it certainly introduced me to some high-quality writing.

A good book about a man that cant sleep well,that gets a mystery illness,and drifts awake and asleep and dreams about his life the love of his life and Middle East,good read

I was very disappointed with this book, finding it extremely dense and at times impenetrable. I have read most of the other Booker shortlist and have found them all intriguing, unusual and engaging in their own ways, but this one was irritating and almost deliberately alienating. I really wanted to like it, as I found some parts erudite with a musical flow which could have drawn in the reader; instead the author compounded layers of incomprehension on each section, with seemingly endless paragraphs and further references that needed to be looked up, creating an overall effect of dullness for this reader, which was totally unexpected. It may well be a brilliant novel, but just not for me.

I wonder if in future years, ‘Compass’ will appeal to those in search of obscure book challenges. The novel is set over one insomniac night; instead of chapters, we are given timings, starting (after a prelude) at 11.10pm and tracking the night hours till 6 in the morning. If it wasn’t for having to go to work in the morning, I would have been sorely tempted to see if I could keep track with the narrator. I’m sure it would have been a stretch (it’s a long book) but it would have been a great way to read the rambling, circular prose.

One of the reasons this target-driven project so appeals to me is that, aside from the timing notifications, the ‘Compass’ seems ironically fond of losing itself along tangents. The title comes from a joke present given to our narrator Franz, a replica of Beethoven’s compass, altered so that ‘pulled unremittingly by magnetism, on its drop of water, the double red and blue needle points east‘. The contents of the novel are also constantly pulled to the East, the focus of Franz’s study and the obsession of the woman he loves.

‘Compass’ convincingly takes us into the mind of an academic fixated on a scholarly topic. There are digressions about music, art, history, archeology, medicine … everything links together and reinforces the idea that the concept of the ‘East’ is the paramount obsession of the West. The incidental details are fascinating, especially the biographies of eccentric early ‘Orientalists.’ Less convincing are the comments on the current reality of the region. Franz tells us ‘I’d like to write a long article on Julien Jalaleddin Weiss, homonymous with Leopold, another convert, who has just died of cancer, a cancer that coincides so much with the destruction of Aleppo and Syria that one could wonder if the two events are linked‘. I think the point being made is that those who love Syrian culture have been devastated by the tragedies that have befallen the region, but I am deeply uncomfortable both with the suggestion that cancer is linked to foreign wars and with what seems horribly close to European appropriation of a Middle-Eastern country’s loss and grief.

The fact is, ‘Compass’ is interested in the cerebral rather than the physical. We’re told that Franz suffers from a debilitating illness (hence the insomnia) but he is uncharacteristically reticent about specifics, giving the excuse that ‘I don’t want to plunge into these names of disease …‘ The love of his life, Sarah, is as close as the novel gets to a woman of action, and we discover that she spends most of her time meditating in Buddhist retreats. If you want a nighttime ramble through European myths of the Middle East, ‘Compass’ will be a rewarding read, filled with unexpected historical gems and a wealth of trivia about the Western obsession with the Orient. For me, many of the conclusions don’t hold up in the cold light of day, though that may not be the point. As the book’s title suggests, it probably depends on how you approach it.

Utterly stunning and erudite with purpose - this intertwined melancholic story told by music scholar in love with scholar Sarawho specialises in arcane books and objects sending articles as communication to him as they travel in various places of the world finding or remembering to find each other - until the main event - it's all about the journey and the splendid allusive and vivid voice telling us about fragments of their lives togeher and apart - told in rich imagery and objects, moving across times and places ... I totally loved this startling and beautifully wrought book .. I hope publishers get this out everywhere ...

I was so sure I wasn’t going to like this book. Long, discursive, stream-of-consciousness, quite possibly pretentious – no, not for me I thought. My foreboding wasn’t helped by Leo Robson in the New Statesman who called it “gloomy, dense….refuses the reader various basic co-ordinates, erecting a barrier to comprehension”. But nothing ventured nothing gained, plus it won the Goncourt and has garnered many adulatory reviews. And my goodness, just as well I kept an open mind because I found the book, although certainly challenging, totally immersive and engaging, and the narrator Franz most certainly not the bore that Leo Robson found him. The whole novel comprises a long monologue by Franz Ritter, a musicologist as he ruminates, remembers, speculates during a long insomniac night, worrying about his health, looking back over his career, thinking about his love Sarah, looking at the relationship between East and West and how the West views the East both historically and today. It’s an erudite and learned book but wears its erudition and knowledge lightly and is full of references that this reader delighted in either recognising or turning to Google for. Conversations, thoughts, discussions, ideas – anything that comes to Franz’s sleepless mind. Yes, it is dense and relentless but there’s charm here too and occasional comedy and the overarching theme of Orientalism has never been more pertinent to our current conflicts. A compelling and absorbing read.

This is a singular achievement in writing, history and travel. It brings together traditions of east and west in an exceedingly clever way. The scope of the dying Ritter's memory and experience is breathtaking. It is an easy book to read although it's monologue style might be too sedentary for a lot of readers.