The Novelist as Information Machine

Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle section–a panorama and phantasmagoria of the history of French village life–is vexing and, at times, fascinating and delightful.