Mathias Énard's 'The Deserters' explores memory, war, and betrayal

In "The Deserters," Mathias Énard blends past and present conflicts to examine the human cost of war and ideological fracture.

Illustration by Elena Vizerskaya

By Novanka Laras and Hayu Andini

In The Deserters, Mathias Énard returns with a haunting new novel that delves into the personal and political traumas of war, ideology, and fractured identity. Originally published in French as Déserter in 2023 by Actes Sud and now available in a faithful English translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Deserters weaves together two seemingly unconnected narratives: one steeped in the ideological complexities of 20th-century Europe, the other echoing the stark, contemporary violence of an unnamed modern war.

Énard, whose literary oeuvre has consistently engaged with the devastations of conflict—from the Balkan wars to the Arab Spring and colonial entanglements—wrote The Deserters while grappling with the invasion of Ukraine. As he noted, the language of “Nazis” and “denazification” that resurfaced in contemporary discourse began to haunt his work-in-progress, altering its direction and tone. “Odesa, the Alexandria of the Black Sea, was about to suffer the fate of Sarajevo,” he wrote, capturing the tragic recurrence of history. In response, The Deserters became not just a novel of ideas but a meditation on history’s grip on the present.

Paul Heudeber’s legacy and a daughter’s reckoning

The first narrative arc centers on the late Paul Heudeber, a fictional East German mathematician and survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. A committed communist and staunch anti-fascist until his death in 1995—an apparent suicide by drowning—Paul’s legacy is explored through the eyes of his daughter, Irina, a historian. She attends a commemorative conference in his honor aboard a boat on the river Havel in September 2001, a moment eclipsed by the seismic events of 9/11.

Irina’s first-person account merges academic analysis with personal inquiry, attempting to unravel her father’s mysterious relationship with her mother, Maja Scharnhorst. Once a teenage member of the German resistance who later became a West German politician, Maja’s defection from East to West Germany remains a shadowy episode in the family’s history. Irina’s narration—though laced with emotion—retains a scholarly tone, using formal language and referring to her parents by their first names. This approach distances readers, casting the narrative as a kind of archival excavation rather than a confessional memoir.

Énard complicates Irina’s search for truth by placing her in a post-ideological world where past convictions crumble under the weight of betrayal and disillusionment. Paul’s unwavering commitment to socialism contrasts sharply with Maja’s apparent pragmatism. Their opposing trajectories serve as a metaphor for Germany’s split after World War II—and the personal toll of its reunification.

The unnamed soldier and the cost of survival

Running parallel to Irina’s academic journey is a second narrative, set in a vague Mediterranean landscape that evokes the terrain of southern Europe or North Africa. This thread follows a deserter—unnamed, weary, and alone—as he flees a modern conflict reminiscent of today’s wars. Clad in filth and fatigue, he treks northward toward an unspecified border, pausing to take refuge in an abandoned family cabin nestled in the mountains.

Here, memory and survival collide. The deserter recalls peaceful childhood hunting trips with his father, moments that sharply contrast with the brutality he has escaped. One day, he encounters a woman from a nearby village, accompanied by a donkey. The tension between them—he, unpredictable and haunted; she, wary and vulnerable—builds the novel’s core suspense. Is she in danger, or can he still reclaim his humanity?

The scenes involving the deserter are rich with visceral detail, described in a style that breaks conventional prose boundaries. Énard employs poetic line breaks, erratic punctuation, and intermittent capitalization, suggesting that war itself dismantles language. This technique reinforces the sense of psychological disarray while adding a lyrical, almost parable-like quality to the story. Unlike Énard’s typical use of the first person, this storyline unfolds primarily in a close-third perspective, though it occasionally shifts in point of view.

A meditation on war’s enduring imprint

Though the two plotlines never directly intersect, they resonate thematically. Both Irina’s retrospective on post-war Germany and the deserter’s aimless journey through a modern war zone explore the disillusionment of ideological collapse. In The Deserters, Énard rejects neat resolutions; instead, he offers fragments of truth, memory, and myth, leaving readers to navigate the moral ambiguities on their own.

The translation by Charlotte Mandell, who has previously worked on five of Énard’s novels, leans toward the literal, faithfully conveying the complexity of his prose. In some places, this approach results in slightly awkward phrasing—such as “a poor guy in a family of poor guys”—which may strike English readers as flat or ambiguous. The original French term pauvre type carries a more condescending tone, closer to “loser,” but Mandell’s choices reflect the author’s own linguistic idiosyncrasies rather than missteps in translation.

Mandell’s translation choices highlight Énard’s refusal to smooth over stylistic roughness. Tense shifts, awkward sentence structures, and fragmentary thoughts are not errors but features of a prose style that mirrors the fragmentation of war and memory.

Shifting perspectives and fractured narratives

While Irina’s sections are presented through letters, memories, and personal reflections, her detached tone creates emotional distance. She is more historian than daughter, and her investigation reads like a research paper rather than an intimate memoir. The structural separation between the novel’s two storylines—historical and contemporary—underscores their thematic differences. Although they echo each other, they do not converge, which may frustrate readers expecting a unifying narrative arc.

Nevertheless, the dual structure serves Énard’s broader objective: to reveal how history’s unresolved tensions continue to haunt the present. From Buchenwald to the Cold War, from 9/11 to an unnamed modern battlefield, The Deserters suggests that humanity’s cycles of violence are enduring and ever-recurring.

Who is the real deserter?

The novel’s English title, The Deserters, pluralizes the original French infinitive Déserter, implying that more than one character is guilty of abandonment. Indeed, Énard invites readers to consider desertion in its many forms: Paul’s suicide, Maja’s escape from East Germany, Irina’s self-imposed exile in Cairo, and the unnamed soldier’s retreat from battle. Each has, in some way, fled—whether from political convictions, family obligations, or moral certainties.

These departures are not simply acts of cowardice or betrayal. Rather, they reflect the painful necessity of survival in a world fractured by ideological failure. In one poignant moment, the deserter, wrestling with guilt and desperation, turns to God for help. His plea resonates across the pages, echoing Irina’s own search for meaning and absolution.

A sweeping reflection on Europe’s postwar century

With The Deserters, Mathias Énard threads together the horrors of Nazi Germany, the dissolution of socialist utopias, the trauma of 9/11, and the chaos of a modern conflict to present a sweeping meditation on the persistence of war and human vulnerability. “All the threads of History seemed gathered together in a single hand,” Irina reflects during the conference—a line that encapsulates the novel’s ambition and scope.

The novel ultimately reminds us that peace is neither inevitable nor permanent. Maja’s naive hope for a harmonious 21st century rings hollow in light of Énard’s narrative, which underscores the brutality that continues to shape the world. As the author told Granta in 2018, “You’ve had the Cold War, you’ve had many violent episodes, and you’ve had this horrible war at the end of Yugoslavia. I hope that literature can help us to remember that.”

The Deserters succeeds as a challenging, thought-provoking work that pushes readers to confront the uncomfortable truths buried within history. Through its fragmented form and lyrical prose, it offers a powerful reckoning with what it means to survive, remember, and resist.