Literature
Article reserved for subscribers
In this first volume of a quadrilogy which will take us to America, stop in Berlin in freezing weather, for a mental wandering in ten stages.
It contains the tone of the entire book, its themes and its movement. Here it is, it’s the first sentence of Melancholy of the bordersfirst volume of a quadrilogy which will take us to America: “Near Berlin, as we were leaving the clinic where we had visited E., as night fell (purple, violent sky, covered in shadows and the quivering of poplars) and we were walking towards the railway station of iron, a little dazed by the sadness of having left E. on her hospital bed, in this long winter when she was a recluse, a verse from Blanca Varela came back to my memory: “Where everything ends, unfolds your wings.”
It’s raining. The drizzle will give way to sleet. This frosty late autumn evening is the thread that Mathias Enard chooses to wander through his thoughts, organizing his story by digressions and associations, in around ten steps. Beelitz, west of the Brandenburg March, is the first. Beelitz-Heilstätten was “the largest sanatorium in Europe” at the end of the 19th century, a brick village which fell into ruin, on one hundred and forty hectares of woods. The clinic where friend E. was transferred is one of the last remaining buildings of what was a gigantic military hospital for the Soviets, from 1945 until the early 1990s. The German wounded of the First War
