Berlin in late autumn isn't exactly the most cheerful place in the world, and for an author like Mathias Enard, that atmosphere, heavy with history and chill, has become the perfect setting for his latest literary adventure. Based in Barcelona for the last two decades, the French writer has decided to set aside pure fiction for a moment to immerse himself in a story that has much of a personal confession and a wandering essay, moving away from the complex plots of his previous successes.
This time, he presents us with a work entitled Melancholy of the Borderlands: North, published in Spain by Random House, which marks the starting point for a large-scale project. It is an ambitious tetralogy where each volume will explore a different cardinal point, starting with this icy Berlin that the author knows very well from his youth and which he now explores with a much more leisurely and reflective gaze.
The trigger for a walk through memory
Let's be clear: this isn't your typical travel book with tourist recommendations. It all kicks off with a harsh dose of reality: the stroke suffered by his friend E., which lands her in the Beelitz clinic. This event, which the author handles with extreme sensitivity, serves as the driving force that It pushes the narrator to walk Wandering aimlessly around Brandenburg, trying to process a loss that is not a death, but an irreversible transformation of the loved one.
Through these pages, the author explains that his intention is not to succumb to cheap nostalgia for times past, but to embrace the melancholy that arises from accepting that time marches on and there is no turning back. This is an important distinction for Enard, who uses the silence of the hospitals and the ruin of the old sanatoriums to construct a cartography of what remains when everything seems to crumble around us.
The narrative unfolds as an interior monologue that flows in rhythm with the author's steps, who acknowledges that after walking for half an hour, his thoughts shift and he enters a kind of fertile meditation. In this sense, the work becomes a hybrid between the trial and the narrative, where what is recounted is strictly real, although it uses tools typical of the novel to give color to the ghosts that inhabit the German capital.
Walking as a form of thought and culture
Enard's erudition is breathtaking, yet in this text it breathes naturally, without feeling like a history exam. His wanderings are populated by figures like Robert Walser, found dead in the snow, or the spirit of W.G. Sebald, who acts as a guide from beyond the grave through the darkest corners of the European conscience. References to Schubert's music or the painting of Caspar David Friedrich, elements that help to create that "winter journey" atmosphere so present throughout the volume.
The guy knows every nook and cranny of Berlin like the back of his hand, from the remnants of the Wall to the ghost stations that still seem to echo the Cold War. This obsession with borders is no accident; the author explores both the geographical boundaries that divided the continent and the invisible language barriers and the mind. She talks about how the citizens of the former GDR were left without a country overnight, a historical wound that rhymes with the fragility of her convalescent friend in the hospital.
Throughout the work, the author reflects on the role of literature as a bridge connecting different eras. For him, a book is a form of establish a knot between today and the day before yesterday, a necessary tool in a world where the publishing business and the traditional way of reading seem to be under constant threat from global changes and the digitization of leisure.
A continent of walls and literature
The Spanish translation, skillfully done by Robert Juan-Cantavella, manages to maintain the fluid, long-sentence prose that characterizes the original French. It is fascinating how Enard connects Aristotle's meteorology with the purest Romanticism, suggesting that the clouds are the mirror of a broken soul. It is a reading that demands attention, but rewards the reader with a depth rarely found in current literary production, so given to the immediate.
Without hesitation, the author has already hinted that the next installment in this series will take us east. The second book in the tetralogy, which is already finished, promises a journey. from Venice to Istanbul Crossing the Balkans, he maintains that non-fiction approach that allows him to explore territories where pure imagination cannot reach. It seems we'll have Enard around for a while, as long as we're willing to lace up our boots and keep up with him to the ends of the earth.
Ultimately, what Mathias Enard offers us is a total immersion in European identity through its ruins and its books, reminding us that walking is, at its core, a form of resistance against oblivion. This first installment of his Cardinal series establishes itself as a lucid and impartial testimony about the fragility of life and the persistence of memory, inviting us to look squarely at those shadows of the past that, far from disappearing, continue to shape the map of our immediate present.