Mathias Enard, Hôtel Balkan, Actes Sud, 16/09/2026, 272 pages, €22.50
One morning at the start of August, while Saturn shone in the southeast quadrant of the summer sky, to finally drown the memory of a youthful love that tore at my chest in a sudden grief, I resolved to descend the river named Sèvre Niortaise…
From the opening, the reader is drawn into a solitary journey that, as the narrative unfolds, takes on the shape of an intimate odyssey whose wanderings one relishes following. It is the kind of dark, nostalgic adventure that sits entirely within the Mélancolie des confins, the second installment of a saga begun in 2024, corresponding to the cycle of the four cardinal points. After Nord, the first volume, here comes Hôtel Balkan, subtitled Mélancolie des confins II – East. Each paddle stroke described in this second opus strives to retrace the traces of places that, at one time or another, are anchored in the author’s memory.
Poetic Wanderings
In turn, the Seine, where he once discovered Proust; the Isonzo, that Slovenian river celebrated by the poet Ungaretti; the Danube of Magris; or even the Bosphorus estuary of the Turkish writer Nedim Gürsel will serve as mnemonic references to this Balkan region. Yet it is primarily near Saint-Maixent, solitary on this Sèvre that bends to avoid the farms along its banks, that Mathias Enard unveils the early pages of his wandering.
The river is eight meters wide at this point; I stay in the middle. Waves of sadness seize me at times, and I expel them by paddling very quickly, as one runs to catch one’s breath, to recover the vanished spring, the scents of Sarajevo, to erase the minuscule pain of a passion so old that its star-burn vanishes among the countless stars of the August night.
Thus shaped by the landscapes, in a tangle of historical events, digressions, and personal memories, the poetic wandering continues, dark and captivating at once.
Between Literature and the Dramas of History
Entre littérature et drames de l’Histoire
The narrative proceeds with a confrontation, in these sometimes emblematic places, of the great dramas of the past century—notably Nazism and Stalinism—and adopts a more contemplative turn with the invocation of celebrated writers such as Rilke, Zamyatin, Marguerite Duras, Lamartine, Herman Melville, and many others, acting as precious salvific powers when grief seems too heavy to bear. Thus, as the pages turn, these voices of novelists joined to the atmospheres of the darker periods in History interweave into a powerful, continuous narrative.
The wars of the 1570s–1580s, when I read The Tragedies, resemble the wars of Lebanon, the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo: destructions; tortures are agonies that are difficult to render with their full diversity… And everywhere, it is difference that executes. The Catholic burns the Huguenot alive. The Serb burns the Muslim alive. The Serb burns the Croat alive. The Croat burns the Muslim alive. The Muslim slaughters the Christian.
The cruelty that endures, in short, as if the lessons of the past had served no purpose. A troubled wandering through time that passes and changes nothing, far from it, to the madness of humanity. A text rich and sprawling, divided into several chapters that resemble a path of the cross, which challenges as much as it fascinates. And even though the book displays a – perhaps too – broad erudition, both in literary terms and in its exposition of Balkan conflicts, it reads with surprising ease because the prose remains especially fluid despite the lengthy tirades the author favors. Whether read in one sitting or in bursts, one simply lets the text carry one along, and the charm inevitably takes hold. A testament to the allure of this Mélancolie des confins saga, for which the third installment—West or South—is eagerly awaited, at the will of Mathias Enard…
The Hôtel Balkan article, from Trieste to Sarajevo – Mathias Enard first appeared on Lythrum Press.
