Strains of innocence and guilt run through both sides. Someone’s views can shift as easily as a gun can be aimed, and individuals begin to fall into roles out of fear or hate, almost against their will. This is a book about trying—and probably failing—to escape the aftershocks of one’s own trauma, about trying to shake one’s ghosts.
Indeed, for me, Zone is ultimately a book about collective and individual trauma, the way trauma bleeds its way up and down between the individual and the larger collective groups to which he belongs. It is at once about bad faith and about the absurdity that terms such as bad faith take on in the face of decapitation, atrocity, and overwhelming fear. A little push, almost nothing—a bullet that breaks one’s car window, say—may well be enough to tilt the scales and make one begin to become inhuman.
After its publication Zone went on to win several major prizes, including the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Décembre (whose other recipients include such greats as Pierre Guyotat, Pierre Michon, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint), and the Prix Initiales, and to be a finalist for several others. “What is amazing in this horrible and sublime book,” Anne Brigaudeau suggests, “is the magnificent use of language, an uncommon erudition, a meticulous know-how for narrating the worst atrocities of the century, down to little known or forgotten details.” Does Zone live up to such praise? I think it does. It is a profoundly (and complexly) ethical book, satisfying both as a work of prose and in its incisive interpretation of our times. Zone is a major and compelling work, a work that will keep you in its grip from its first utterance to its last.
Brian Evenson
2010
Milestones
Milan
Lodi
Parma
Reggio Emilia
Modena
Bologna
Prato
Florence
Rome
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Board sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
—Ezra Pound
Jerusalem and I are like a blind man and a cripple:
She sees for me
As far as the Dead Sea, as far as the end of days.
I carry her on my shoulders
And, under her, I walk in the shadows.
—Yehuda Amichai
I
everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser a little metallic like the sound of two bronze weapons clashing they make you come back to yourself without letting you get out of anything it’s a fine prison, you travel with a lot of things, a child you didn’t bear a little Czech crystal star a talisman beside the snow you watch melting, after the re-routing of the Gulf Stream prelude to the Ice Age, stalactites in Rome and icebergs in Egypt, it keeps raining in Milan I missed my plane I had 1,500 kilometers on the train ahead of me now I have six hundred still to go, this morning the Alps sparkled like knives, I was trembling with exhaustion in my seat couldn’t close my eyes like an aching drug addict, I talked to myself out loud on the train, or under my breath, I feel very old I want the train to go on go on let it go to Istanbul or Syracuse let it go to the end at least let it know how to go to the end of the journey I thought oh I should be pitied I took pity on myself on that train its rhythm opens your soul more deftly than a scalpel, I let everything flow by everything flees everything is more difficult these days along rail lines I’d like to let myself be led simply from one place to another as is logical for a passenger like a blind man led by the arm when he crosses a dangerous street but I’m just going from Paris to Rome, and to the main train station in Milan, to that Temple of Akhenaton for locomotives where a few traces of snow remain despite the rain I turn round and round, I look at the immense Egyptian columns supporting the ceiling, I have a little drink out of boredom, at a café overlooking the tracks the way others overlook the sea, it doesn’t do me any good it wasn’t the time for libations there are so many things that divert you from the path, that lead you astray and alcohol is one of them it makes the wounds deeper when you find yourself alone in an immense freezing train station obsessed by a destination that is in front of you and behind you at the same time: but a train isn’t circular, it goes from one point to another whereas I am in orbit I gravitate like a chunk of rock, I felt like a measly pebble when the man approached me on the platform, I know I attract madmen and deranged people these days they rush into my fragility they find a mirror for themselves or a companion in arms and that is truly crazy, priest of an unknown divinity he has an impish cap and a small bell in his left hand, he holds out his right hand and shouts in Italian “comrade one last handshake before the end of the world” I don’t dare shake it afraid he’s right, he must be forty, no older, and he has that keen prying gaze of fanatics who ask you questions because they’ve just discovered an instant brother in you, I hesitate before the outstretched arm terrified by that screwy smile and I answer “no thanks” as if he were selling me a newspaper or offering me a smoke, then the madman rings his bell and begins laughing in a big doleful voice and pointing at me with the hand he offered me, then he spits on the ground, moves away and an immense almost desperate solitude sweeps the platform at that moment I would give anything for arms or shoulders even the train taking me to Rome I would give up everything for someone to appear there and stand in the middle of the station, among the shadows, among the men without men the travelers clinging to their telephones and their suitcases, all these people about to disappear and give up their bodies during the brief digression that will take them from Milano Centrale to Fossoli Bolzano or Trieste, a long time ago at the Gare de Lyon a deranged mystic had also announced the end of the world to me and he was right, I had been split in two then in the war and crushed like a tiny meteor, the kind that have stopped shining in the sky, a natural bombshell whose mass according to astronomers is laughable, the madman in the Milan station reminds me of the gentle screwball in the Gare de Lyon, a saint, who knows, maybe it was the same man, maybe we grew at the same rhythm each on his own side in our respective madnesses and find each other on platform number 14 in the train station in Milan, a city with the predatory Spanish military name, perched on the edge of the plain like a glacial crust slowly vomited by the Alps whose peaks I saw, flint blades ripping the sky and setting the tone of the apocalypse confirmed by the demon with the bell in that sanctuary of progress that is the Stazione di Milano Centrale lost in time like me here lost in space in the elegant city, with a patch on my eye like Millán-Astray the one-eyed general, a bird of prey, feverish, ready to rip vibrant flesh to shreds as soon as the light of flight and danger is found again: Millán-Astray would so have liked Madrid to become a new Rome, he served the Iberian Franco Il Duce his bald idol in that great warring prelude to the 1940s, that one-eyed belligerent officer was a legionnaire he shouted viva la muerte a good military prophet, and he was right, the fugue of death would be played as far as Poland, would raise a tall wave of corpses whose foam would end up licking the shores of the Adriatic, in Trieste or in Croatia: I think about Millán-Astray and his argument with Unamuno strict high priest of culture while travelers hurry to the platform to take off for the end of the world and the train leading them straight there, Unamuno was such a classical and noble philosopher that he didn’t see the massacre on its way, he couldn’t
