Translated from French by Frank Wynne
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023, 486 pages. Original version published in 2020.

David Mazon, a student of ethnography in Paris, moves for a year to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the Deux-Sèvres region of western France, to conduct research for his thesis on agrarian life. He finds a place to live—an apartment in a farmhouse owned by Matilde and her husband Gary.

We learn about David’s life in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe through his journal. He settles into his new home, which he names The Savage Mind (a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book about the “untamed mind”), and is soon joined by two cats, Nigel and Barley. And by a colony of red worms in the bathroom, near the shower, which he finds disgusting.

He starts out by being a little supercilious about rural life and the villagers—“I found the name of the village amusing and that it is far enough in the arse end of nowhere to be interesting”—but the village gradually grows on him, and he finds himself reluctant to leave, although he misses his girlfriend Lara, who is in Paris. He keeps procrastinating work on his thesis; instead, he plays Tetris or has steamy video calls with Lara. But as he becomes more involved in the village, Lara and his life in Paris seem further away.

The first part of the book is David’s diary. Since his research involves talking to the people in the village, he gets to know them: Martial, the mayor and leader of the gravediggers; Lucie, a climate activist and farmer; her brother Arnaud, who can rattle off every event that happened on a particular day; their grandfather, whom David tries to interview but finds almost impossible to understand; Max, an artist; Thomas, the landlord of the Café-Pèche, the centre of village life; and Father Largeau, the priest who is secretly in love with Matilde.

David’s story ends abruptly and the book moves into an interlude called Song (there are six of these throughout the book). The interludes tell the story of someone from the village, often from the past. The first one is called On the Steps of the Palace and is a short love story, the unspoken love of a cobbler for a florist.

This book, however, is not a straightforward narrative. The transmigration of souls—the Wheel of Life, as Mathias Enard calls it—is at the heart of the book. When Father Largeau dies, a sow in the forest gives birth to piglets, and Father Largeau is reborn as a wild boar.

Everyone in the village has been through various lives, both as humans and animals. The red worms in David’s bathroom are murderers who are paying for their sins. As David pours bleach on the worms, “he was unaware that he was returning to the Wheel the black souls of murderers whose vicious crimes had condemned them to many generations of suffering, blindly slithering in the damp”.

The book moves between the Songs and a narrative about the villagers. This time, we do not see them through David’s eyes but through a third-person narrative that revisits some of the events described by David, seeing them from another point of view. The narrative also loops back to the past and the future of the village and the various lives that had been—and will be—lived by its people. Lucie, in her past lives, has been “a Protestant victim of the Dragonnades of Louis XIV, a zealous revolutionary executed by the Comité de salut public during the Terror, a French soldier obliterated by a shell during the First World War…”.

Bit by bit, Enard builds up a layered history of the Deux-Sèvres region, and of France, as the book moves between the Songs and narratives about the villagers. There is a large cast of characters, and some of them just flit by—the Songs, for example, are about people from whom you never hear again—but together they form a mosaic of the region.

The centrepiece is the annual banquet of the gravediggers’ guild. The writing here changes completely—this is a homage to Rabelais: over-indulgent and excessive. There are echoes in the book preparing us for this: David is reading Rabelais’s Gargantua, and on one of his trips in the region, he finds the ruins of an abbey that inspired the writer.

The annual banquet is a three-day feast for the gravediggers, three days when Death declares a truce with the living. The men eat and drink almost non-stop—there are mouth-watering descriptions of the food—and hold forth (often pontificate) on philosophy, whether women should be allowed into the guild, and share lots of vulgar jokes.

Once the banquet is over, the narrative winds back, and the last section takes us to where it all began: David’s diary. A lot has happened to David since we last saw him, and he has grown from a self-absorbed young man into a mature adult, more aware of the world around him.

When I started the book, I did not know what to expect and thought it would be a much heavier read than it was. David’s diary had me chuckling, and I enjoyed the stories about the villagers and their past and present lives. For me, the weakest part was the banquet—it went on for too long (79 pages!), and was a little too over the top. But it works as a tribute to Rabelais: excessive, vulgar and erudite. Not really my thing, though.

The book is quite unlike anything that I have read. The writing glides from one style to another, all skilfully translated by Frank Wynne. The borders between the dead and the living, between the past and the present, seem porous, and the book moves seamlessly between them.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild reads like Enard’s love letter to Deux-Sèvres, where he spent much of his childhood. This book immerses you in the history of the region and its present concerns: for example, the growth of agribusinesses and their threat to the older ways.

But most of all, this book is a celebration of life.