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Summary
Summary
In 1506, Michelangelo--a young but already renowned sculptor--is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design had been rejected: "You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal."
Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II--whose commission he leaves unfinished--and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants--constructed from real historical fragments--is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.
Author Notes
Mathias Enard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, Zone, and Street of Thieves .
A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres,Mandell has translated works by a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Énard is known for his monolithic novels Zone and Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt), making his latest translation into English, a slim and studious volume, a surprising and exciting break from form. Set in 1506, it is the story of Michelangelo Buonarotti, still in his early 30s and not yet at the height of his renown, smarting from his perceived crude treatment at the hands of the Pope and eager to outdo his rivals, Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael. The proud artist leaves Rome to accept a commission from the Sultan Ali Pasha of Constantinople to design the bridge that will connect the great city with the greater Holy Roman Empire. But in Constantinople, Michelangelo finds himself beguiled by the company he keeps: Manuel the translator, Mesihi the poet, and the page Falachi, with whom Michelangelo is something more than friends. Michelangelo spends his days in Constantinople arduously designing the bridge, and his nights in almost psychedelic debauchery. The flavors of the East will prove transformative to the Florentine, as Renaissance sensibility collides with the flourishing Muslim world, leaving him to conclude that "we all ape God in His absence." a historical novel of exquisite beauty. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
As a surveyor of east-west relations, the French novelist was drawn to the idea of a Renaissance artist taking an Islamic sabbatical - but the result is fiddly and unpersuasive When a novelist writing in a language other than English is discovered mid-career by Anglo-American readers, old books and new books take turns in tumbling forth. In certain extreme cases, it may be felt that belated demand is being answered by the wrong kind of supply. Writing in the mid-sixties, John Updike appeared irritated that Vladimir Nabokov, rather than extending his identity as an American writer by "composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire", had become consumed in the backward-looking endeavour of translating his "minor" Russian works. The majority of instances are more straightforward. A writer scores a hit after years confined or nearly confined to Japanese or Norwegian or, in the case of the brilliant and mercurial and - we now know - highly inconsistent Mathias Énard, French. An oeuvre is waiting. Translators get to work. The author, if alive and equipped, might be called on to help with the odd nuance. Énard's first appearance in English came at the start of this decade, with his fourth book, Zone, a single-sentence spy thriller that doubled as a history lesson on east-west violence. Translated by Charlotte Mandell - an unenviable job, brilliantly done - it was made available in the UK in 2014, as the agenda-setting first title from the new imprint, Fitzcarraldo. By that point Mandell was ready with a second title - Énard's seventh book, Street of Thieves, the portrait of a young man who flees the Arab spring and runs straight into the eurozone crisis, chosen presumably on the grounds of topicality. Fitzcarraldo published that book in the summer of 2015, and within a week Énard appeared on the shortlist for the Goncourt prize for his ninth book, Boussole, and went on to win. Since then, there has been more recognition, including a place on the shortlist of the 2017 Man Booker international prize for Boussole 's English-language version, Compass, but no successor. For the first time, there isn't an obvious Énard to turn to. The book that has been chosen, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, was originally published in 2010, straight after Zone (still the earliest Énard book to be translated). By following Compass into English, it retains its position as the fiddly and unpersuasive successor to a barnstorming visionary harangue. The novel exploits recent discoveries in "the Ottoman archives" and potential ambiguities in authenticated letters to imagine that in 1506 Michelangelo accepted an invitation to work for the sultan in Constantinople. Énard is keen to alert the reader when things cannot be known or, when they are known, to give a source ("Ascavio Condivi, his biographer, tells us"). Unfortunately, when history is able to help, it helps mostly with items and objects. The novel more or less begins with the "list of things" that Énard guesses would have disembarked along with the 31-year-old sculptor (among them nine rolls of Bergamo satin and five barrels of saltpetre) and ends with an inventory of his lifetime achievements, notably the seventeen large marble statues and hundreds of square metres of frescoes. The Ottoman invitation involved a commission to design a bridge across the Golden Horn, though for the novel's purposes, Michelangelo really goes to Constantinople to observe exotic phenomena while working his way around the outsider's repertoire of responses ("Michelangelo is dazzled by the opulence and splendour of the court"). And the novel itself is structured as a kind of list - a series of instalments, each marked with a pilcrow, often lasting well under a page. At the same time, Énard wants the freedom to depict encounters, invent dialogue, and so on. The clash of the novel's identities (essayistic critique of historical fiction Conventional historical novel) is most obvious in the scene when we are told that Michelangelo "will not talk about this night in the quiet of the bedchamber" with "the few lovers he is known to have had". Unverifiable speculation about an event that may well not have taken place swiftly gives way to the rigours of the record. The purpose of the exercise isn't simply to insist that Michelangelo went to Constantinople but to ask what, once we've taken it for granted that he did go, this might tell us, in particular about the status of such pinnacles of "western" art as the Sistine ceiling. The "future painter of genius" considers his hosts "strange" - they are worshippers of Muhammad, familiar to Florentines as a resident of Dante's Inferno - but he remains open and receptive, his "gaze" transformed by the city's "otherness". How other is it As a surveyor of east-west relations, Énard was understandably drawn to the idea of a Renaissance artist taking an Islamic sabbatical, spending months as a bridge between the worlds of Julius II and Bayezid II. But in Énard's own telling, Constantinople is itself "balanced between east and west", with many "familiar" attributes. It's not so surprising that Michelangelo's Moses, created for the papal tomb, bears the "imprint of attitudes and characters" that, the novel insists, he would have met in Constantinople if that city was part-western, displaying a strong and recent Christian heritage. Énard's taste for paradox - everything we call "eastern" is partly western, and vice versa - pre-empts and even cancels the larger argument about points of east-west contact that his novel exists in order to reveal. A palimpsest has no use for a bridge. - Leo Robson.
Kirkus Review
Continuing his explorations of the meeting of East and West, French novelist nard (Compass, 2017) imagines a lost episode in the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.History tells us that the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, having rejected a design by Leonardo da Vinci to join Europe to Asia by a bridge over the Golden Horn, approached Michelangelo with the same project. History adds that Michelangelo said no. But what if the answer, nard posits, had been yes, as newly discovered documents suggest? Michelangelo, after all, had been having endless troubles getting paid by Julius II, "the warlike, authoritarian pope who has treated him so poorly." The temptation to slip across the border of the Papal States into Florence and thence to Venice and Constantinople would have been great, especially because the sultan knew just how to appeal to him by contrasting him to Leonardo: "You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal." That, and he'd quintuple his salary. Intrigue immediately ensues, for there are spiesof the pope, of Venice, of the sultaneverywhere, and where there are spies, there are lures and temptations. And then there's Mesihi, the Kosovar Muslim who guides Michelangelo between two worlds and becomes more than a Virgil in the bargain, first taking Michelangelo to the former cathedral and now mosque of the Hagia Sophia, now devoted, as Michelangelo thinks, to "the one Dante sends to the fifth circle of Hell." In his way, Mesihi is as great an artist as the master, a man who "loved men and women, women and men, sang the praises of his patron and the delights of spring, both sweet and full of despair at the same time." Naturally, cultures and personalities come into collision, and all does not end well for Michelangelo, "afraid of love just as he's afraid of Hell," or, for that matter, for anyone in Michelangelo's orbit.An elegant meditation on what might have been. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
LATE-LIFE LOVE: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar. (Norton, $25.95.) The influential literary critic blends tales of her marriage, her cancer treatments and her husband's age-related infirmities with discussions of works whose meaning has changed for her over time; her rereadings confirm her talents as a teacher. MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America's founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought "multicultural" harmony. INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagamé. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan's taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) Gunaratne's striking, Bookerlonglisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a workingclass Northwest London suburb. Despite the rush of drama indicated by its title, the book should be read for its quieter details - Gunaratne, with a gift for characterization, presents the kinds of Londoners not often seen in contemporary fiction. THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge connecting Europe and Asia. SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate's dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the '60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
