Compass

Énard has become one of France's leading novelists by writing about the Mediterranean as a crossroads of cultures—East and West, North and South—and Compass, which won the Prix Goncourt, France's most sought-after prize, makes that subject even more explicit than ever. Tracing one insomniac night in the mind of Fritz, an Austrian musicologist drawn to the cultures of the East (Arabia, Persia, and beyond) and to Sarah, a fellow scholar of the Orient, the book is not quite the "fever dream" described on the back cover but a lucid, impossibly learned tour of a mind buzzing with curiosity, knowledge, and a melancholy sense of its own limits. "Orientalism" may, thanks to Edward Said, have become a pejorative, but Compass revives the flawed romance of the West's desire for the East in a dense, indirect story that builds, finally, toward a surprisingly moving conclusion.