French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.” The central conceit of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the great “wheel of suffering” through which the souls of all living things are reincarnated in a new form immediately after death. Murderers, for example, come back as red worms slithering “cheek by jowl” under a dank shower tray in a rundown rural annexe rented by an anthropologist who is writing a thesis on “what it means to live in the country nowadays”.
The novel is also a long love letter to the Deux-Sèvres, where Énard spent his childhood: a predominantly rural area, situated east of the Vendée and 100km inland from the Atlantic seaport La Rochelle. When the comically pretentious anthropologist visits a farmers’ market in Coulonges, he hears the dialect Poitevin-Saintongeais spoken among the vegetable and poultry sellers. On a fish stall, gaping crabs, dribbling lobsters and tight-lipped oysters wait on beds of ice “to be returned to the abyss only to be reborn, again and again, in one form or other”. Meanwhile, the fishmongers and farmers’ wives are oblivious to the fact their merchandise once was human.
