The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

By Mathias Énard, Frank Wynne (translator),

Book cover of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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…

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