Perfecting the Shot by Mathias Enard
French fiction
Original title – La Perfection du tir
Translator: Charlotte Mandell
Source – Subscription edition
I’m back, and I’m back with one of my favourite writers from my blogging days: Mathias Enard. I was very lucky to have been sent Zone when it first came out, and it’s hard to believe how time has flown. But even then, I think I may have noted somewhere that it wasn’t his debut novel. One thing we have in English is that we tend to get a lot of writers’ canon out of sync, usually when they win a big prize or have a book that has caught the zeitgeist; they reach us in English, and sometimes that’s the third or fourth novel. This was the case with Enard: we first got his fourth novel in Zone, and now we get his debut. I like how you could see parts of his later works in his debut.
At first I didn’t know what to think, because if a fifteen-year-old girl took charge of my mother and came to live at my place, the neighbourhood would talk. But at the same time, they were all afraid of me because they knew I was a fighter. First, I set aside the business of Myrna, more out of laziness than anything else. I’d go to the house two or three times a day to see how my mother was doing, and that was it. I didn’t know how to get her to eat. She was getting visibly thinner. And she was refusing to talk to me.
She didn’t quite remember who I was, I think. It should be said that I was always dressed in khaki, at the time. With the cartridge belt and everything. For weapons I carried just an automatic and a knife. It was better to be armed all the time, you never knew what could happen. And also it was like a uniform: if you carried a prominently displayed gun, then you were a soldier. Most of the fighters had a Kalashnikov, but I didn’t. First of all because it shoots poorly and second because a handgun makes you look important. Like an officer, in a way. The problem with my rifle is that with the stand, the scope, the binoculars, it’s all so cumbersome.
Myrna arrives to help his mother !!
Perfecting the Shot follows our narrator, an unnamed sniper in his teens. His mother is ill, and the locals send a young woman, Myrna, a 15-year-old, to look after her. The book is framed that way. The boy sniper tells us how he does his job with a stunning detachment from the people he is killing. How they have made themselves visible and how easy it is for him to kill them. It is just a job to him; the more he kills, the less he is bothered by the people he kills. There is the home where the young girl is looking after the mother, and in the evening, when the young boy first sees the body against the light of Myrna, the young man is struck and falls head over heels for the young woman caring for his mother. But she doesn’t feel the same. What happens when she leaves, creeped out by him? What will this killer do? What actions will he take? Will he get her back?
That’s why I always prefer shooting, not out of cow-ardice, but out of a sense of efficiency. The rest is a waste that’s at best inevitable. The one in charge of my sector agreed with me, too, and we’d organized our positions based heavily on snipers and machine-gunners. We were aware that before you gained ground, you had to be sure not to lose any. And by keeping the tallest buildings, we could harass the enemy all day: there’s nothing more demoralizing than seeing your comrade hit right in the head by a bullet that seems to have come straight from nowhere. Or to want to leave your home and be forced to stay there because a bullet has just struck the wall ten cen-timetres away from you – entire neighbourhoods were being transformed into deserts and simple avenues were becoming uncrossable no-man’s-lands. Obviously they copied our methods, because ours were the best. Once you understand it’s war, you have to get organized.
How he feels about shooting
One thing I have always liked about Enard’s books is how he sets his tales in nameless places; so is this the Balkans, the Middle East, or Africa? It could be anywhere. That gives the prose a universal feel, like he did in The Zone. Enard also uses the nature of violence and how it affects people in his book. This is a study of a boy detached from the world by his violence. I was reminded of Jude Law’s character in the film Enemy at the Gate. Also, the serial killer in the film Man Bites Dog shows how violence can become almost a natural part of someone’s life; killing is almost a matter of fact. But then there is also how this boy sniper is still a boy when it comes to the sexual attraction to Myrna; he feels it and can’t cope with it the way he deals with killing those he sees through his sight.But the main connection I felt whilst reading the book is to the fiction of another French writer, Jean Paul Manchette; his book, Prone giunman, is another tale of a sniper on his job. I looked up, and Enard said he is a fan of Manchette’s writing. It is a pacy book that can easily be rad in an evening i did as I just couldn’t put it down to I’m done with the book. Have you read Enard?
