Used book – The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild, Mathias Enard, Thierry Renard

For a thesis on “country life in the 21st century,” aspiring ethnologist David Mazon left Paris and took up residence in a modest village in Deux-Sèvres. Lodged on a farm, soon equipped with a moped, eating at the Café-Épicerie-

Pêche, and gleaning local knowledge from the amiable mayor – also a gravedigger – the newcomer begins a field journal.

But he is still unaware of some of the eccentricities of this place where Death leads the dance. When it seizes someone, it immediately thrusts them into the Wheel of Time, recycling them as either an animal or a human, granting them an immediate destiny or one in an earlier era.

With the exception of a three-day truce each year during which a banquet is held for the gravediggers to feast, without scruple and in fabulous opulence of food, libations, and language. For the flavors of language, its persistence and metamorphosis, are the epicenter of this extraordinary novel, as full of boisterousness as it is fond of popular culture, rich in memory, and fertile in fraternity.