Zone – Mathias Enard

Description

Francis Mirković, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years,is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arm dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from ALgiers to Trieste, which has become his specialty – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the voilent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Zone is an Iliad of our time, and extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.