The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard was translated by Frank Wynne and published in 2023 in the UK by blog-favourite indie press, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in the USA by New Directions, who probably would be a blog-favourite if any of their books ever ended up in secondhand bookshops. The novel was originally published in French in 2020 as Le Banquet annuel de la Confrérie des fossoyeurs.

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A glorious, cacophonous, collage of various delights and pleasures, in The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild Mathias Enard excels at writing in multiple styles, tones and narratives, which all combine together into a deeply satisfying, deeply enjoyable and raucously funny whole.

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I loved it.

Obviously, I was going to love it, I’ve loved all of the other Enard novels I’ve read [in translation] over the past few years, and it was only the terror of finding this one too complex with my mushy baby-incoming and then new parent brain that led me to put off reading it for so long that I’ve somehow damaged my copy of the book in a way that I don’t really understand…

There is crunchy, crumbly, pure white crystallised material in the bottom corner, sticking pages and the cover together. I think, possibly – and this is a guess because I’m in Canada at the moment and live with a Canadian in London – it was maybe dipped/dropped in some maple syrup??? Possibly it was wetted by salt water at some point? Certainly the damaged corner of the volume in my hand bears evidence of both previous dampness and some kind of no-longer-present solution. There’s no stickiness, though I’m sure that, were I to re-add water to the now dry and slightly misshapen French flaps, some stickiness could return, but it’s not something I’m willing to test as I don’t want this book to be damaged any further. It also didn’t cause any damage more than a maximum of 5mm in from the edge of the page, which is thankfully much less than the margins used by Fitzcarraldo, so my readerly enjoyment of the text faced no impact at all.

Thankfully. Thank you. Because the writing here was unmissable, so I’m very glad I didn’t miss any.

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Much like all of Enard’s texts (that I’ve read, in translation), this is big, complicated/complex (I need to learn the finer differences between those words) writing that is incredibly engaging and evocative of many different places and times.

The opening and closing segments of – I believe – seven, though possibly only six… I should check that, but it’s not my style to do so… But it’s Enard, so I’ll make the effort…

The first and final sections (of seven, with short fictionalised prose summaries of the narratives of folk songs in between) are the diaries of a young and failing anthropology PhD student who has moved from Paris to the west of France in order to study contemporary rural life.

Rather than digging into any meaningful study and thesis writing, however, David Mazon M.A. instead buddies up with another ex-Parisian blow-in artist type (Max) and hooks up with a sexy youngish (though about a decade older than him) divorcee farmer (Lucie), and becomes far more interested in organic farming techniques and the intricacies of the contemporary agricultural industry (esp. its bureaucracies) for small-scale farmers, than in any study of the people that live there.

However, this doesn’t mean that the text of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is devoid of any complex and deep exploration of the rural French World, far from it. Because the rest of the book is full of regressions and digressions and complexities and overlapping and spiralling narratives exploring lives that go back hundreds and hundreds of years into the past, as Enard describes a highly complex non-chronologically linear system of reincarnation and rebirth known as The Wheel, which is used as a masterful literary device to permit the exploration of the lives of animals, microbes and – of course – hundreds of humans who have lived in this area of France across the centuries…

Enard, then, takes the reader on meanderings through the lives of priests, monks, knights, soldiers, wild boar, badgers, worms, farmers, bartenders and the victims and perpetrators of violent crimes…

the penultimate section veers into some unexpected hyper-violence as Enard describes the most heinous and cruel crimes committed by souls in this region of France, with the novel becoming very graphic in a way I wasn’t quite prepared for, though it is possible to find a narrative and tonal justification for this content, because the novel does include essentially all other facets of human life…

…We look at love, we look at betrayal, we look at faith and its absence, we look at loneliness, at alcoholism, at depression, at cruelty, at meaningless lives, at lawsuits, at buying and selling vehicles, at romancing, at writing, at gossiping, at play, at work, at all sorts of things, all sorts of things, everything, everything that could happen…

…We see changing industries, the changing industrial and capitalistic models of life in France during the past thousand years…

…We see the Wars of Religion, we look at the Huguenots, and we see the ways in which expectations of lifestyles, of health and education and so on have changed across the course of time…

There are passages about hunting, about hiding, about exploring, about rowing and punting and transporting cows to pasture on small boats… it’s a really entertaining and evocative and varied text…

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The middle section of the novel takes us to the eponymous banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild. These are the only people who seem to be aware of The Wheel and its vicissitudes and realities and the repercussions of a poorly lived life… (the murderers all end up repeatedly reincarnated as worms for a very long time)-

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The middle section of the novel is a gastronomic delight, it is a Rabelaisian (that’s the adjective on the back of the book, I’ve never read Rabelais so I don’t know exactly what that means) section of in-depth writing about food, about excess and particularly about wine. In fact, it contains some of the most fun wine writing I’ve read since I last read Kermit Lynch (I need to get back to studying wine once I’m back in the UK in the New Year…), for example: “a Beaujolais, a little light, precocious, easy quaffing, so sprightly in the goblets that it dashed off ruby sparks whene’er it met the candles’ glow” (p. 251)

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Obviously, a slight criticism needs to be raised re: the overlong and unmemorable title, but that’s the only negative comment I have, really…

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a varied and complex, super engaging, very fun and meandering novel that tells short stories in brief pages, long stories, small stories, big stories, and all of those set in a part of the world that doesn’t really get very much air time.

I loved it.

I thought it was great.

Romantic writing (e.g. “I didn’t want her to leave; she didn’t want to go home. / That was the sum total of our thinking” (p. 433)), comedic writing, serious writing, hyperviolent writing, food writing… err… other bits… yeah…

Enard has been able to set up the novel’s reincarnation concept/conceit as a deeply playful canvas applicable for the exploration of multiple styles of literature and thought.

In this text we have Lucky Jim type literary snobbery comedy, we have historical fiction, very modernist stream of consciousness, passages of highly complex gastronomical excess, and all the other elements I’ve mentioned above.

It’s all fun, really, but it’s also deadly serious as literature and deadly serious in its meaning.

More books should be like this.

Order direct from Fitzcarraldo via this link.