Title : The Annual Banquet of the Brotherhood of Gravediggers - Mathias Enard - book

Summary :

For the purposes of a thesis devoted to "country life in the 21st century," apprentice ethnologist David Mazon left Paris and took up residence in a modest village in Deux-Sèvres. Living on a farm, soon equipped with a moped suitable for his investigations, eating at the Café-Épicerie-Pêche and drawing on local knowledge from the friendly mayor - also a gravedigger - the newcomer began a field journal, recording small true facts and local customs, determined to circumscribe and epitomize rurality.

But he ignores some of the whims of this place where Death rules the roost. When it seizes someone, it is to immediately throw them into the Wheel of Time, recycle them into an animal as well as a human, grant them an immediate destiny or one in a previous era - as if to better resuscitate this deep France whose local and regional soil Mathias Enard excels at plowing, at excavating its historical strata, without ever losing sight of the small circle of villagers who surround the ethnologist and outline (perhaps) the happy neorurality of our tomorrows.

But the Mayor is already busy preparing his brotherhood's annual Banquet - a gargantuan three-day feast during which Death calls a truce so that the gravediggers - and the readers - can feast without qualms in a fabulous opulence of food, libations and language. For the flavors of language, its persistence and its metamorphosis, are the epicenter of this stirring of the centuries and of this extraordinary novel, as full of truculence as it is enamored of popular culture, rich in memory, fertile in fraternity.

• EAN : 9782330135508
  
• Used book
• Book in good condition
• The book matches the photo