Perfecting the Shot by Mathias Enard

Some of the best novels I’ve read in my life have been by Mathias Enard.

Reading Zone a decade ago blew my mind open to the possibilities of the stream of consciousness novel, which I thought had been done to (and beyond) death by the 2000s, yet Enard proved there was still something of power, potency and pleasure to be squeezed out of it; the Rabelasian* The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild – which taught me at length about the Bardo (a concept I have struggled to not think about on a daily basis) – was a gorgeously complex and playful extrapolation of reincarnation and grotesquerie, yet also the small dramas and less dramatic actions of small-town life. A powerhouse. Tell Them Of Battles, Kings and Elephants is an incredible historic novella, crisply and directly and playfully bouncing through the Renaissance with creative and cultural aplomb. The others of his I’ve read – Compass, Street of Thieves – are also perfect, complex, irresistable and deeply significant literary masterpieces. I mean, they all are in their translations into English (all translated by Charlotte Mandell, bar The Annual Banquet… which was translated by Frank Wynne) as, alas, I cannot read the original French. Which means, yes, that there are many acclaimed Enard novels I am yet to have read.

All of these Enard novels have been published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions, a publisher that everyone I knew loved, back when I knew people. (Maybe people do still love them, but reclusive and recluded and feeling alone and lonely in ways that I’d never quite believed would happen to me again, I have no idea what people who read, read, and what people who read think about the things they read. I suppose a lot of my loneliness comes from the loss of the online spaces I used to spend time in a decade ago. Are they there, without me in them? I don’t look, I haven’t looked for a long time. Maybe I should? Maybe I should?)

This one, published in 2026 and translated once again by Charlotte Mandell is a treat, then, in that it revisits an early book of Enard’s that hadn’t previously been rendered into English. This, Perfecting The Shot, originally titled La perfection du tir, was published in 2003 and is Enard’s debut. And it is – for good, for ill, for the fact that it is – very, very, very much a classic “man’s debut novel”.

This is the kind of book that had I read it when it was new or nearly new, I would have probably thought was the best thing I’d ever read.

Because this is fiction that is directly and unsubtly looking at many of, most of, the most serious issues and conversations and ideas that novels ever explore that are explicitly masculine-coded. This isn’t a gentle bildungsroman looking at what it’s like growing up as an intellectual, bookish kid in a small city somewhere, like so many other debuts are, this is the opposite of that: this is a first person narrative about a psychopathic and increasingly hostile and cruel teenage sniper taking part in a civil war, whose moral code, ethical code and justification for and enactment of violence oscillates by mood, order and who is in front of him.

Alone, he is often his cruellest, and in public he sometimes exhibits moments of gallantry that fly in the face of what he actually wants and feels, but takes no pleasure in being “better” than the equally psychopathic men he is around in the warzone.

He just follows his urges, moment by moment; he is terrifying, and having a weapon in his hand makes no one safer, but the world around him more dangerous by far.

Hyperviolence

Hyperviolence

Hyperviolence

Misogyny

Cycles of abuse

Hyperviolence

Miosgyny

Hyperviolence

restart at beginning

–///–

I’m terrified and stressed as fuck right now. I’m typing this at speed on the train on the way to work, this job I’ve been doing these past months that I have felt worse and more miserable in than probably any moment in my life for a decade.

I emailed my resignation on Friday evening after a couple of things happened last week that – for me – finally and irrevocably crossed a line as to what I’m willing to accept in a workplace. It felt good, to quit a job on principle, but that means that today I’m going to have to have – at best – a short conversation outlining exit timelines and – at worst – a long conversation that likely leads to an immediate departure.

I’m worried about someone being mean to me. I’m worried about speaking my mind. I’m worried, a little bit, about finding other work, but not so worried that it stopped me from sending the email.

I’ve discussed the circumstances with many other people I know irl and everyone has praised my resolve, including – thankfully – my life partner, who is the only other person who will be directly financially affected by my need to not have this full time job for much longer.

I have been miserable in a way I haven’t been in a long time, incorrectly – once again – behaving as if monetary stability is worth more than living in a constant state of miserable denial; I have ignored red flags and thought “I cannot afford to leave, even though I hate it here” and it’s all been a triggering mess of nostalgia and discomfort.

Today likely won’t be the last day I’m there, and it probably won’t be the last shit day. But it will almost certainly be another really, really, really shit day and I just wish I didn’t have to live through it to get to the other side…

–///–

24 hours Later:

Not much has changed. I had a brief conversation with a more senior member of staff that was, to be blunt, the most constructive 20minutes I have had in that workplace the entire time I’ve worked there. Today I have to have a conversation with that person’s boss (and hopefully the chain ends there or maybe it doesn’t!).

It’s interesting, it feels really interesting to act in a way, professionally, that aligns with my opinions and values outside of work. For years, basically, I’ve allowed myself to believe that integrity is simply not compatible with having a steady and regular income. And, I suppose, this has demonstrated that it isn’t, for now. But for many other people, right, it is possible? It is possible to go to work and not feel ashamed of what you’re doing, of not contributing to what amounts to, in your opinion, evil?

There’s no one I’ve yet spoken to about this who has responded to my revelation that I’ve quit my job due to a red line crossed of personal ethics who has asked me, “Will you be ok for money?” And I don’t know if that’s just because people just presume that no one would quit a job on principle unless they could afford to do it, or if I do just personally convey an aura of stability and savings and/or access to cash that renders the question moot…

To be honest, though, I can’t really afford to do it, financially, in the short term, but in the medium and long term I couldn’t afford to not do it.

What’s the Bible line about gaining the world but losing your soul? I felt my soul slipping away like it had slipped away before, but I certainly hadn’t gained the world.

What I gained, what I was gaining, what I have been gaining, is not worth more than my soul. And it’s nice to know that.

Maybe things will be a little ropey, financially, difficult, tight, unpleasant… Maybe I’ll have found another, more suitable, full time job to wander into before the year is out. I honestly, honestly, don’t know.

What does a person like me do, I have asked before. I guess it’s time to find out…

–///–

Perfecting The Shot is full of violence, hyper violence and sexual violence; torture, execution, cruelty, disembowlments, major injuries as a result of shrapnel…

It contains neglect and coercion, blackmail, deceit, hypocrisy and basically every other vice and malevolent action one can think of.

The narrator-protagonist is a psychopath, comfortable to kill with no motive and often choosing to do so without orders or even the pretence of a military goal.

He takes part in torture – to varying degrees of complicity – and sexual assault of prisoners, again, to varying degrees. He idolises the other, crueller, evil, men in the warzone, and holds all who are not soldiers in his army in utter contempt; not just the enemy soldiers, but also every single civilian he is both supposed to protect, who he also regularly kills and assaults merely because he can and he wants to.

He has an ailing mother whose carer he abuses; he threatens and manipulates those in his community and he barely feels remorse for any of his immoral actions. He is a psychopath disinterested in the inner lives and thoughts or feelings of those around him. He’s an absolute fucking nightmare.

Compared to other protagonists of Enard’s novels, there is much less ambiguity here; although the shooter may have sufficient backstory of being groomed to cruelty and being neglected and abused in the domestic space to explain his easy shift into constant and uncontrolled violence, he is, definitively, evil. When he considers being better behaved, it is rarely with any compassion for others, and only with a selfish, narcissistic consideration of how it would or could benefit him if he were to do so. He is, yes, eighteen, and, yes, he has not had an easy life; but he is a monster.

Enard, then, leaves us bluntly in the horrific and messy and confused mind of this young killer; we sit with him as he considers whether or not to join in with sexual violence, we sit with him as he considers which non-combatants to arbitrarily kill through his sniperscope, we sit with him as he reflects on – or fails to reflect on – the things he has done, the things he is doing, and the things he will likely do again.

This is a novel, then, depicting the dregs of humanity, the cruelties of sadistic machismo, the toxicities of rampant misogyny and the horrors of war. It is, yes, a classic man’s debut novel; horrible and shocking and violent and cruel; depicting a vile world with clear condemnation of it, yes, but also depicting it in such a way that an amoral (or openly evil) reader could enjoy it with little reflection.

This is the kind of novel all the lads were writing 40 to 20 years ago, and though this is absolutely in the tradition of Blood Meridian and American Psycho, the fact that it’s a mere shadow of where Enard and his work would go makes it a justifiable read in this (sometimes) more enlightened aged.

Enard does a kind of book that I don’t really read any more incredibly well; the horrors and the disgust are rendered poetically, literarily, and though it may be a nasty place to sit, it’s under two hundred pages long, it’s beautifully done and it is, alas, a literary treat.

It’s about bad people doing bad things, but it really is done very, very well.

Not Enard’s best work, no, but absolutely isn’t worth avoiding…

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* I have never read any Rabelais, but this was the description used on the blurb and in other people’s comments about it, and it has a cracking sound to it as a word so I suppose I may as well use it, too. Use it without properly understanding it, of course, the behaviour of the out-of-their-depth working class intellectual (or intellectual-adjacent) person since the beginning of time. I use language, ignorantly, knowing that those who know its meaning may see through my mis-use, yet so terrified, terrified, terrified, to appear or understand whatever it is that I am, that I cannot, will not, don’t know how, to do anything else.