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Finished this finally, unintentionally in the perfect way, reading from three to five in the morning when I couldn't sleep. It's the perfect way to finish because this is an insomniac's diary, or more so, its conceit involves an Austrian insomniac's cognitive perambulations in bed in Vienna as he makes his way, only ordered by the increasingly late hour, through the occidental experience of (the novel's keyword) in the orient.

It's about the interpenetration of east and west, self in th Finished this finally, unintentionally in the perfect way, reading from three to five in the morning when I couldn't sleep. It's the perfect way to finish because this is an insomniac's diary, or more so, its conceit involves an Austrian insomniac's cognitive perambulations in bed in Vienna as he makes his way, only ordered by the increasingly late hour, through the occidental experience of (the novel's keyword) in the orient. It's about the interpenetration of east and west, self in the other. Like, it's a vehicle for erudition, an assemblage of a whole lot of stuff previously unbeknownst to me. In 'Zone,' each phrase of a discontinuous, single, 500-page sentence is like the ties along the tracks the narrator rolls over seated in a train, providing basic forward movement and structure, whereas in this one, the narrator is in bed mostly, or puttering around his apartment, as nocturnal hours pass. In both novels, the masks the author wears (his narrators) have insider information - although he's not a former spy as in 'Zone,' the academic orientalist narrator of 'Compass' feels more naturally aligned with the author who I believe at one time taught Arabic at the University of Barcelona.

The narrative mask seems more transparent. At one point, research is associated with espionage and this is sort of like the secret history of the western infatuation with the east, but Enard being a great writer blurs the duality and complexifies it. He also refers to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata solely as his 14th sonata, which I then had to look up on Spotify, which really comes in handy when reading this since you can find Mendelssohn's Octet and choose from dozens of versions, or pieces by Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, or any other piece by western classical composers you don't know at all or well that are discussed at one point. Someone with more time should put together a 'Compass' playlist.

The title itself refers in part to Beethoven's compass, which is set to point east instead of north. It's not all about 'orientalist' interests, however - there's also a love story with another academic, Sarah, who the narrator loved and loves still, and idealizes, especially times together in Tehran and Damascus, and the love story, the history of their interactions since then, the cooling off, the letters, the time together in Vienna when Sarah only wants to visit museums related to horror, establish the novel's spine, the trunk from which the limbs of episodes and anecdotes and the foliage of essay and ideas can grow. Although nowhere near as conventional as Enard's last translated novel, the love story is satisfying enough, as is all the esoteric information and all the reference particularly to writers and artists and composers.

Ultimately, like 'Zone,' this is a major Reference Work, what I've decided to call these contemporary novels that rely so heavily on biographical reference, particularly to artists, philosophers, musicians, et al, that they're almost something like disordered encyclopedias, like fragments from the fourteen-thousand volume compendium of all knowledge at the time that went up in flames thanks to the incursion/aggression of Westerners in China. It's five-stars in terms of the author's ambition, execution, and erudition but I nevertheless docked a star for my reading experience: I could only read this in bits and pieces, a few pages on the subway to and from work, a few pages before sleep overwhelmed me or I decided to put it down in favor of a tight NBA playoff fourth quarter streaming to my tablet. At times I thought it could have been edited more stringently, could have been pruned throughout and lost a hundred or more pages without missing much overall, but its ranginess and excessive stream-o'-consciousness sleepless progression also seem essential to what makes it feel unique. Anyway, definitely recommended reading for anyone willing to immerse themselves in the long history of western addiction to oriental alterity, beyond belly dancers, magic carpets, genies, all the way up to those recent black-hooded Islamic State decapitators from London. Lots of interesting opium-related stuff in here, too. And a nod to hope in the end. All of the authors' novels I've read in English have been translated by Charlotte Mandel, a tandem I count with confidence among my favorite contemporary writers thanks to this one's addition to their achievements, all different yet united in their focus on Euro-Eastern interaction and the often but not always resultant atrocities.

Now on the outstanding longlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses. In Germany they impose the Scriptures on you in the back of the bedside table drawer, in Muslim countries they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose marking the direction of Mecca on the desk, compass and wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabian Penisula, but also, if you're so in Now on the outstanding longlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses. In Germany they impose the Scriptures on you in the back of the bedside table drawer, in Muslim countries they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose marking the direction of Mecca on the desk, compass and wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabian Penisula, but also, if you're so inclined, Rome, Vienna or Moscow: you're never lost in these lands. I even saw some prayer rugs with a little compass woven into them, carpets you immediately wanted to set flying, since they were so prepared for aerial navigation. Matthias Enard's Compass, translated, like his wonderful novel Zone, by the highly accomplished Charlotte Mendel, is a novel dedicated to, inter alia, 'The Circle of Melancholy Orientalists' and the Syrian people. The book consists of the recollections and stream of associations, during one insomnia filled night in Vienna, by Frank Ritter, a musicologist specialising in the influence of the oriental on Western Music. We Europeans see them with the horror of otherness; but this otherness is just as terrifying for an Iraqi or a Yemenite.

Even what we reject, what we hate, emerges in this common imaginal world. What we identify in these atrocious decapitations as ‘other’, ‘different’, ‘Oriental’, is just as ‘other’, ‘different’, and ‘Oriental’ for an Arab, a Turk, or an Iranian, My initial bliss digging into this rich novel soon gave way to more serious labor. Whereas Jim Gauer's masterful Novel Explosives was a We Europeans see them with the horror of otherness; but this otherness is just as terrifying for an Iraqi or a Yemenite. Even what we reject, what we hate, emerges in this common imaginal world. What we identify in these atrocious decapitations as ‘other’, ‘different’, ‘Oriental’, is just as ‘other’, ‘different’, and ‘Oriental’ for an Arab, a Turk, or an Iranian, My initial bliss digging into this rich novel soon gave way to more serious labor. Whereas Jim Gauer's masterful Novel Explosives was a fanfare of images and poetry, this is a sustained exercise, an unflinching exploration of the relations between East and West and perhaps, ultimately, what Pessoa quipped is the 'East east of the East.'

Pessoa looms large here, but alas, so do ranks of figures from Cervantes and Beethoven to Balzac. The novel is a nightlong insomniac agony of a (perhaps dying) Austrian musicologist Franz Ritter who ponders the efficacy of scholarship in our world- while his misspent attentions and affections have crisscrossed the globe - especially towards and in the form of Sarah, a French ethnologist whom the protagonist has loved for decades and cravenly been unable to articulate. There are lateral paths and stories revealed on nearly every page, how the vampire novel has roots in the cross-pollination of Turkish and central European music. Thomas Mann and his children wave a significant shadow over these proceedings. Leverkuhn as Nietzsche/Schoenberg proceeds, finding nurturing in Flaubert's Egyptian orgy and thus affording a mirrored reading of Leg Over Leg: Shidyaq is thusly embraced. There are links between Rimbaud's amputation and Edward Said's piano playing - if you look for them. Despite such erudite architecture, this is also a novel of opium, wine and unfortunately beheadings.

Etymology, poetry and emancipatory politics make for cumbersome bedmates but the reader can only benefit from such congestion. Matters did appear to lose momentum but I felt it to be tremendously moving throughout. RE-VISITED (NOT FULLY RE-READ - SEE COMMENTS BELOW) DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher (their words) specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. It focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language.

Their novels are (my words) distinctively and beautifully styled, with plain, deep blue covers and a 'French-flap' style. And that serves as som RE-VISITED (NOT FULLY RE-READ - SEE COMMENTS BELOW) DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher (their words) specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. It focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language.

Their novels are (my words) distinctively and beautifully styled, with plain, deep blue covers and a 'French-flap' style. And that serves as something of an introduction to this novel. Distinctive, at times beautiful styled, but also very French - a winner of the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize - but perhaps a novel less designed obviously appealing to non-French speaking literary tastes (it was shortlisted for but did not win the 2017 Man Booker International Prize). Ostensibly the set-up of this novel is that it is set over a single night of insomnia, as Franz Ritter (an Austrian Musicologist, suffering from an unnamed, but he believes, serious illness) thinks back on his various travels and researches in the Middle East and in particular his (at least on his side) obsessive relationship with a French academic, Sarah. In practice this book is more of a Sebald-esque meditation on the Middle East (particularly Syria, Iran and Turkey), on Orientalism, and the relationships and interactions of Westerners (archaeologists, writers, musicians, academics) with that area over the last few centuries. Sarah’s central thesis (one which explicitly rejects Edward Said’s “Orientalism”) about this relationship is that: What we regard as Oriental is in fact very often the repetition of a ‘western’ element that itself modifies another previous ‘Oriental’ element, and so on the Orient and the Occidental never appear separately, they are always intermingled, present in each other and.these words – Orient, Occidental - have no more heuristic value than the unreachable directions they designate.

The actual conceit of the novel is very weak – Ritter’s feverish thoughts seem to allow him to reproduce details both of his own adventures and (even more unlikely) various historical episodes in encyclopaedic (and often also tedious) delay including with reproductions of articles and documents, which are sometimes excused by Ritter apparently getting up to look at them, but which at other times are unexplained. At times also the book turns effectively into a non-fictional book or perhaps more of some form of cultural essay or doctoral thesis – and, it has to be said, a poorly organised and at times tedious one. I found at times myself sympathising with Ritter’s own thoughts What an atrocity to think that some people find dreaming pleasant. I made a start on this book several months ago when it was long listed for the Man Booker International prize. I gave up after a third of the book because I felt like I was being tortured by being force-fed Wikipedia articles. This time, I stuck with it and made it to 100%. I’m not at all sure what it is I want to say about this book, so I took the unusual (for me) step of looking at some other reviews before writing my own.

There are two quotes from The Guardian that, I think, sum up my sentiment I made a start on this book several months ago when it was long listed for the Man Booker International prize. I gave up after a third of the book because I felt like I was being tortured by being force-fed Wikipedia articles.

This time, I stuck with it and made it to 100%. I’m not at all sure what it is I want to say about this book, so I took the unusual (for me) step of looking at some other reviews before writing my own. There are two quotes from The Guardian that, I think, sum up my sentiments: Fascinating though the facts often are, the scores of pages of this kind of thing are mainly rendered in detailed precis: there is very little direct speech in the novel, which helps to evoke the febrile meanderings of insomniac memory but it also threatens to send the reader, if not Franz, off to merciful sleep. And the book concludes with a surprisingly upbeat, if not sentimental, flourish. As the dawn does for our sleepless hero, this comes as a relief to the reader, who emerges from this strangely powerful work as from a feverish dream. I think one thing that helped me get to the end this time was the fact that I recently read and from the main Man Booker long list. Compass is a sort of meditation on the interaction between East and West and it often gave me cause to think back over those two books.

She could show how these objects are the result of successive shared efforts, and how what we regard as purely ‘Oriental’ is in fact, very often, the repetition of a ‘western’ element that itself modifies another previous ‘Oriental’ element, and so on; she could conclude that Orient and Occident never appear separately, that they are always intermingled, present in each other, and that these words – Orient, Occident – have no more heuristic value than the unreachable directions they designate. This quote also highlights one of the problems I had with this book: the sentences are simply too long (this is a relatively short example) and I found it (even though I have read all of Pynchon!) rather mind-numbing. That said, I think the mind-numbing is partly deliberate. The book is the rambling thoughts of Franz Ritter through a sleepless night. He is wrestling with his thwarted love for Sarah and remembering the times they have spent together. Both of them, in different fields, are fascinated by the interaction of East and West, so his thinking about Sarah feeds his thinking about Orientalism (and vice versa). Unfortunately, I ended up in the place the narrator finds himself when considering a colleague he would pace up and down the corridors thinking out loud in a low voice, for hours, kilometres of corridors travelled, and this monody, as knowledgeable as it was unintelligible, got on my nerves terribly.

Last time I read this I abandoned it and gave it 1 star. This time, I have completed it and I am upping my rating because I can recognise the literary merit of the book. But I cannot claim to have enjoyed it, despite the odd flash of humour. So, 2 stars is as far as I can go. It’s won prizes already and may well go on to win more, but it’s not one I could support. “Boussole” had been one of my top reads last year, and (in my opinion), a very deserving Prix Goncourt winner.

I was thus happy to plunge into this dense and atmospheric novel a second time, as part of the 2017 Man Booker International challenge. I can happily say that “Boussole” certainly holds up to a second reading. The book is about Franz, a middle-aged Austrian musicologist, who is having a sleepless night. He spends what should be his sleeping hours revisiting memories of his past travels a “Boussole” had been one of my top reads last year, and (in my opinion), a very deserving Prix Goncourt winner. I was thus happy to plunge into this dense and atmospheric novel a second time, as part of the 2017 Man Booker International challenge.

I can happily say that “Boussole” certainly holds up to a second reading. The book is about Franz, a middle-aged Austrian musicologist, who is having a sleepless night. He spends what should be his sleeping hours revisiting memories of his past travels and reflections on the Orient; memories that centre around the unrequited love of his life, a brilliant academic by the name of Sarah. And so, over the course of the night, we follow Franz from country to country (e.g., Austria, Iran, Syria), from memory to memory, from love story to love story The book is ultimately part travelogue, love story and essay on Oriental historical, political, literary and musical trends. It respectfully renders homage to the East and strives to underline, throughout the entire narrative, the interconnectedness of East and West, and how both worlds have always nourished and exchanged with one another. “Boussole” is a dense, atmospheric novel that utterly impresses the reader, given the breadth of knowledge and erudition contained within. I was particularly captivated by the ‘love story’ told by Sarah’s thesis supervisor in Iran, and by the ‘night under the stars’ in Palmyra.

This is not a fast read, but a novel that you will want to savour slowly, while listening and viewing -in the background-some of the referenced music, historical sites and paintings. It is a wonderful success of a novel that I would wholeheartedly recommend to any one interested in learning more about the Orient. Sebald's Pernicious Influence One of the challenging properties of painting is that influences are immediately visible: there's no hiding indebtedness from Pollock, Richter, or Schiele.

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Novels are complex in time and structure, and influences can be masked by masses of detail. 'Compass' is at first intermittently, then forgivably, but finally overwhelmingly and depressingly indebted to W.G. Enard has Sebald's penchant for travel in Europe, and he loves weaving histories of places and peop Sebald's Pernicious Influence One of the challenging properties of painting is that influences are immediately visible: there's no hiding indebtedness from Pollock, Richter, or Schiele. Novels are complex in time and structure, and influences can be masked by masses of detail.

'Compass' is at first intermittently, then forgivably, but finally overwhelmingly and depressingly indebted to W.G. Enard has Sebald's penchant for travel in Europe, and he loves weaving histories of places and people together. He has Sebald's sweet melancholy, and Sebald's nostalgia mixed with pain.

But there is a signal difference: Enard is insufferable. He is a snob in two specific senses: he wants to enlighten his readers, and he wants them to know how much he knows.

109-11, Enard's narrator, Ritter, tells us how Beethoven gave the premiere of his own Moonlight Sonata, Op. 2 at a time when he was starting to go deaf; it has been recorded that his piano was out of tune, and he didn't realize it.

A woman he loved was in the audience. Enard wants to say that the concert always reminds him of the 'shame and embarrassment of all declarations of love that fall flat.' It's a nice illustration, potentially, but to get to that point Enard needs to tell us who was present at the concert: Antoine and Therese Apponyi, the hosts, later friends, Enard notes, with Liszt, Lamartine, 'the scandalous' George Sand, Balzac, Hugo, Metternich, Talleyrand (and that leads him to mention Napoleon, Goethe, Hafez, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe, and Chateaubriand), the orientalist Joseph Hammer-Purgstall (not yet von Hammer-Purgstall), Chopin, Rueckert, and Mowlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi. This doesn't add atmosphere or content, really, and it doesn't help Enard make his point about embarrassed love. It is name-dropping.

More often, Enard doesn't name-drop: he really does love all his 19th century historical figures, but unfortunately his love leads him to want his readers to know as much as possible. And for me, that recurring pedagogic impulse makes the book unbearable. I often thought that his ideal reader was a combination of a young, curious European academic, avid reader, or book reviewer, eager to learn more about Europe's relation to the Orient, and Sebald himself, whom I imagine Enard wanting to correct - I picture Enard becoming annoyed at Sebald's persistent bias toward western and central Europe, and his obliviousness about eastern Europe, the Balkans, or the Middle East. My copy of 'Compass' has many pages marked 'lecturing Sebald.'

A sign that Enard's real interest is educating ideal readers of both types is the thinness of the novel's framing devices. The narrator is in love, and stories about his fellow scholar Sarah are threaded through the book.

He is also ill with an unspecified disease, and he keeps thinking of that as well. But neither of those become much more than devices. The mentions of his disease are especially unconvincing because they come up so often, and to so little effect.

Clearly Enard considered them useful strategies to keep the narrative afloat - they are excuses and frames for the hundreds of historical, political, musical, literary, and linguistic stories he wants to tell. All this becomes especially difficult to tolerate when his two ideal readers (the educable and somewhat star-struck younger reader or newspaper book reviewer, and Sebald himself) cannot be combined in a general mode of address - when it becomes clear that he wants to say one sort of thing to Sebald (and other older, more knowledgeable readers) and another to reviewers (and other younger and less well-informed readers). An example from early on in the book: on p. 29, he is thinking about Mahler's 'Kindertotenlieder.' First he feels he needs to tell us the title in English (French in the original): '.and now I have Mahler and his 'Kindertotenlieder' in my head, songs for dead children.' And then he needs to tell us about Mahler's daughter: '.composed by a man who held his own dead daughter in his arms in Maiernigg in Carinthia three years after composing them.' This is potted, or condensed, history: and who, exactly, is it for?

If a reader knows Mahler, she knows the Kindertotenlieder, and if she knows them, she knows they are for dead children. I guess that almost everyone who knows Mahler knows his daughter died, even if only a few would know about Maiernigg, or that it's in Carinthia (the latter is important elsewhere in 'Compass'). So on the one hand there's an imaginary reader who knows Mahler, and doesn't need to have this all rehearsed; on the other there's a reader who doesn't know Mahler, for whom this is a somewhat startling but essentially inexpressive or opaque passage. The former is 'Sebald,' and the latter is the younger reader I've been imagining. Somewhere in between is their composite: a reader who knows something about Mahler, so that the mention of 'Kindertotenlieder' strikes a chord, and yet somehow doesn't know about Mahler's daughter, or hasn't thought about how the 'horrible dimension' of the songs 'wouldn't be understood until long after' Mahler's death in 1911.

Contrast this uneasy sense of a reader with the end of the same paragraph: '.these 'Kindertotenlieder' are set to poems by Rueckert, the first great German Orientalist poet along with Goethe.' 30) I imagine not many people who know Mahler will know this, or appreciate the song cycle's place in the history of Orientalism: but in that case this sentence strikes a clearly pedantic tone. It's instructional, and now the reader knows better than before. Enard can't stop himself from dropping hints that he knows a lot about these subjects. He does it through his narrator, Ritter, but those passages come across clearly as claims about his own knowledge. (I have been taken to task for mistaking Ritter for Enard: but the structure of the text permits the inference of an implied author, because the rhetorical position of the narrator when he tells us how much he knows is different from the rhetorical position accorded to the narrator when he tosses and turns in his bed.) Enard, then, has Ritter muse about just how much knowledge he has of the performance history of Beethoven, for example, and the entire of 'Compass' is scattered with ideas for books Ritter (which is to say, Enard) might write. Farther down on p.

30, Ritter muses that 'as a teenager' 'Kindertotenlieder' 'was the only piece by Mahler I could bear': a thought that also serves to remind us that it's not just the narrator who knows his Mahler backwards and forwards. I don't mean to imply that these problems of tone and address could be easily solved. Many reviewers loved this book; of the reviews I have read only Stephen Poole in the 'Guardian' has some of the reservations I have. (He wishes Enard was 'less determined to demonstrate the pleasures of erudition.' ) I found material that I can use when I teach Orientalism and its critiques in my own classes.

The problem is not in the stories themselves, it's their uneasy imbrication into a novel. Enard wants to tell these stories, and it is not easy to know how to set them up, how to make them seem to be naturally lodged in Ritter's stream of consciousness, how to avoid interpolating explanations that Ritter would never bother to give himself. And yet that is exactly what Sebald manages to do, and that's why I think of Enard as a pedagogue, if not a snob, in a way Sebald never is. I have two more complaints. First regarding Enard's range of historical reference.

His narrator is fascinated by the 19th century, which is the author's prerogative. But to the extent that Ritter speaks for Enard, it is unfortunate that his interest drops off so rapidly when it comes to art, music, architecture, and literature of the last hundred years.

Ritter's mind is at home with Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven, and although he mentions Part, Schoenberg, and others, they really aren't part of his imagination. Enard, the implied author, is old fashioned. He studies Orientalism, and he offers some correctives not only to the Occidentalism of Sebald, but to the prejudices and limitations of academic Orientalists. But he himself is embedded in the 19th century: an especially dire condition given that the debates about Orientalism that enable Enard's discontents are themselves late 20th century developments, and they go with a very different culture.

Intellectually, Enard offers critiques of Eurocentrism that were initially enabled by Edward Said and developed in the very large literature following his work; but culturally and emotionally, Enard's world is the exact one that perpetrated all the Orientalist prejudices and projections that even the first wave of Orientalist scholarship in the 1970s clearly rejected. Second, and last, regarding the images. Because I am making a special study of novels with images, I was intrigued to see photographs scattered through the text. But they are also disappointing. The first two are exactly apposite to the book's themes: they are pictures of open two-page spreads from Balzac's 'La Peau de chagrin.'

The first edition has Arabic on the page, a first, as Enard says, in European literature (although I wonder about Renaissance texts: doesn't the Hypnerotomachia poliphili have Arabic?). The second omits the Arabic script. The two images fit the book's themes: they're texts, they're 19th, they're literary, they have to do with translation, and they are framed, in the novel, by a text within the text. But it's a squandered opportunity.

I waited another 12 pages for the next images, and during those pages I was wondering: how did those images get into the text? Did Ritter supposedly have a copy machine? I was taken out of the narrative as I began to wonder about why Enard didn't think a reader might wonder about such things. And then, 12 pages later, on p. 102, Enard has Ritter introduce the third image with a deictic gesture that might well have made Sebald laugh: 'Oh look,' he writes, 'in this article Sarah reproduces the engraving.' And viola, there's the engraving on the next page.

My first thought before deciding to read Compass was, would this be a betrayal? “Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent.” Would Mathias Enard's Compass be an attempt to appropriate or redefine Edward Said's Orientalism? “The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expe My first thought before deciding to read Compass was, would this be a betrayal? “Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent.” Would Mathias Enard's Compass be an attempt to appropriate or redefine Edward Said's Orientalism? “The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert.

From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.” ― Edward Said, Orientalism Would I need to put my guard up? Would this be more of the negative stereotyping we of the Orient come to expect from the Orientalists? I had read some really good reviews from people that I follow, and I was curious! Still, I hesitated. Then after a chance encounter with the translator Charlotte Mandell, I knew that I wouldn't resist anymore.

I was intrigued! I ordered the book.

It arrived with this beautiful cover by Peter Mendelsund whom I had to look up. Check out here: At first, I came across the spelling of the Quran as the Koran. I didn't care for it. For me, this is a spelling I tend to equate with Islamophobes. The preferred spelling is Quran or Qur'an. I reached out to Charlotte Mandell asking her about this particular choice in spelling, and we both agreed that it would be what the narrator Franz Ritter would be more likely to use. I could accept that.

I put my guard down. I found myself deeply engaged with the text. Mathias Enard, a professor Of Arabic at the University of Barcelona had clearly shared his scholarship with us. I found myself learning so much!

'The Orient is an imagined construction, an ensemble of representations from which everyone picks what they like, wherever they are.' It's we Westerners, We Roumis, as the Muslims call us, Christians, who have a sense of the Orient.' 'Orientalism as lament, as a forever disappointing exploration. In fact, the Roumis appropriated this landscape of dream, it's they who now, long after the classical Arabic storytellers, exploit it and travel through it, so that all their journeys are a confrontation with this dream. There's even a fertile current that is built on this dream, without needing to travel, whose most famous representative is surely Marcel Proust and his In Search of Lost Time, the symbolic heart of the European novel.

Proust makes the Thousand and One Nights one of his models- the book of night, the book of struggle against death. ' I found Compass to be fascinating! There was Balzac, the First French novelist to include a text in Arabic in one of his novels. There was also the first Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer- Purgstall who translated the 1001 Nights and Hafez's Divan. I wanted to go see the Schloss Schonnbrunn Palace that has Allah on its frontispiece.

I discovered The Chorus of the Dervishes that mentions the Prophet and the Kaaba that is never performed these days In the folds of your sleeves you have carried the moon and shattered it. Kaabah Muhammad!

You mounted the radiant Borakand, flew up to the seventh heaven, great Prophet! And the Barron Hotel in Aleppo where Agatha Christie wrote the first part of Murder on the Orient Express. She was in room 203. Lady Hestor Stanhope! What a character!

She is said to have inspired Picasso. Joyce mentions her in Ulysses as Molly Bloom's girlfriend.

Marga D' Andurain who found herself a passport husband so she could go see Mecca. It was later thought that she might have poisoned him.

You have Chateaubriand with his travel literature, an itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem. Saadi writes, ' Don't trust the stories of the travelers.

They see nothing. They think they see, but they only observe reflections.

We are prisoners of images of representations.' Layla and Majnun compared to Romeo and Juliet predates Shakespeare by 1000 years.

'Desire for the Orient is also a carnal desire, a physical domination, an erasing of the other in pleasure. We know nothing of Kuchuk Hanim, that dancer-prostitute of the Nile, aside from her erotic power and the name of the dance she performed, 'The Bee'. And oh so much more!

I could go on and on. Do read Compass!

Is it something Italians are proud of and nostalgic about?

See, with China and India, both of them are extremely proud of their ancient civilisations and reminisce about the 'glory days' and when they were the 'biggest and the best'. The Greeks are pretty darn proud about it (even forcing the Macedonians to agree that they've no heritage with regards to Alexander the Great)

But do Italians have that same pride and nostalgia about the Roman Empire?

Or is it something that doesn't feature particularly heavily and Italians don't bother too much about it?