Why did Diane love this book?
By turns hilarious, enveloping, and utterly strange, The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild is a tour-de-force evocation of life in all its rich varieties, from the tiniest micro-organism to the whole human catastrophe, as it has unfolded over eons in an extremely tiny village in western France.
As the novel opens, a budding ethnologist has arrived in this village hoping to interview the locals. What he discovers about the town, however, is that life and death are here in a very unusual relationship. Énard’s premise is utter genius: everything that dies is returned immediately to life again, but never very far away, so petty village conflicts left unresolved in one lifetime reappear, albeit somewhat differently, in the next. And every living thing is subject to unsettling feelings of déjà-vu.
For three days each year, however, the cycle of rebirth stops—those are days of the eponymous banquet when the local…
1 author picked The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents.
But what David doesn't yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the…