French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.” The central conceit of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the great “wheel of suffering” through which the souls of all living things are reincarnated in a new form immediately after death. Murderers, for example, come back as red worms slithering “cheek by jowl” under a dank shower tray in a rundown rural annexe rented by an anthropologist who is writing a thesis on “what it means to live in the country nowadays”.
The novel is also a long love letter to the Deux-Sèvres, where Énard spent his childhood: a predominantly rural area, situated east of the Vendée and 100km inland from the Atlantic seaport La Rochelle. When the comically pretentious anthropologist visits a farmers’ market in Coulonges, he hears the dialect Poitevin-Saintongeais spoken among the vegetable and poultry sellers. On a fish stall, gaping crabs, dribbling lobsters and tight-lipped oysters wait on beds of ice “to be returned to the abyss only to be reborn, again and again, in one form or other”. Meanwhile, the fishmongers and farmers’ wives are oblivious to the fact their merchandise once was human.
The wheel of suffering allows Énard to circle backwards and forwards in time, evoking the dense, often violent history of the region. There are layers upon layers of religious experience embedded in the natural world. Lynn Guérineau, a hairdresser with a large bank balance and deep cleavage, lives in the city of Noirt and drives her Renault through the surrounding lands: “Sainte-Pezenne, Saint-Maxire, Saint-Florent, Saint-Liguaire … a long succession of miracles that, to her ear, comprised a beautiful geographic poem, the map was a great reliquary, the sat-nav a hymn, even someone oblivious to the stories hidden behind such names could not help but sense that it was a region suffused with sanctity.”
Énard is wickedly, brilliantly, subversive of sanctity. When the last parish priest to live in the village of La-Pierre-Saint-Christophe dies, he comes back as a wild boar and encounters his first sow in a copse “a few hundred metres from the presbytery abutting the Romanesque church where Father Largeau departed this life to join the swine”.
Meanwhile the gravediggers work ceaselessly, delivering bodies to the earth, except for the three days a year when they hold their annual banquet and Death gives them leave to rejoice and forget “that which all men know, that we will end up in her arms, a last lover, the same for one and all”. There are no women in the Gravediggers’ Guild, but their possible admission is debated in a pastiche of the kind of discussion that may have taken place in Oxbridge colleges long ago: “Women? You would have women? I fear you do your thinking with your pizzle, Gnarlcock, that pale and paltry manhood.”
Napoleon’s stay in Noirt, on his way to exile on St Helena, is commemorated in this riotous novel through the character of the present-day bar owner Tubby Thomas, who was a female bedbug in July 1815: “the bedbug scuttles over the imperial calf, then over the thigh, bared because of the stifling heat”. Napoleon squashes her and she melts into unconsciousness, not understanding “her reincarnation in the Wheel and her rebirth in another body, a mere moment in the cycle of continual existences”. Eventually she becomes Tubby Thomas, serving drinks to the hapless anthropologist, who will never come close to understanding the Deux-Sèvres.
In Frank Wynne’s translation, this magnificent novel is also a tribute to “translators everywhere, at all times”. The story includes a court scene in which a female character called Pélagie answers a male judge’s questions in the Poitevin-Saintongeais dialect. “Do you understand this woman? Speak French! Clerk, tell the woman to speak French,” the judge demands. In the acknowledgments, Wynne thanks Matthew Mackie, a Scottish translator, for helping him render Pélagie’s answers into Scots: “Weel, is thon no juist braw, a puckle o pudgie pompus pricks wi thair crannies up thair erses (fat pompous bastards with their fingers up their arses, translated the clerk of the court, I believe she is insulting the judge).” Despite its macabre title and subject matter, this novel is a capacious celebration of life, love and language.
• The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Énard, translated by Frank Wynne, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
