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by Mathias Énard
Mathias Enard's first novel, finally in English, is a ruthless demonstration of how violence corrupts the soul.
In an unnamed city completely torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, controls his breath, stays serenely calm, and listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he shoots at civilians while his mentally ill mother cowers in their apartment. But the violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is eventually disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with Myrna threatens to push them all over the brink. This unrelenting book, whose harrowing urgency belies its piercing lyricism, exposes the disastrous effects of extreme violence on society.
"All of Énard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age" ―The New York Times Book Review
"Énard is wickedly, brilliantly, subversive of sanctity." ―The Guardian
This information about Perfecting the Shot was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, Zone, and Street of Thieves.
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