Compass

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

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.