Remember 2008? On one calm November day in that blighted and benighted year of almost-constant panic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quietly announced that they weren’t acquiring any new books, not any at all, and they threw the publishing world into uproar.

Whoa, that really brings me back.

That same heckish day, the three gallant squires at Open Letter Books acquired Zone by Mathias Enard. Whatever they paid for it, it has to be a record high for the most paid for a single sentence because that’s just what Zone is, a single sentence sort-of-spy-novel that stretches–in French, anyway–for 517 pages. Or 516. Whatever it takes, eh?

Well, most of the wait is finally over. Last week, an advance copy of Zone, translated by Charlotte Mandell, finally arrived and slated for publication this winter. Here’s my slightly addled-looking excitement:

Too eager for information to wait for me to read it? Understandable.

Fortunately for you, Enard’s book has already been reviewed (in the French original) at The Quarterly Conversation. Plot-wise, here we go:

In the early ’90s, Francis, whose mother is Croat, joined the fight for the independence of the motherland: first against the Serbs, then against Bosnian Muslims. Although he doesn’t mention it clearly, he cannot deny his participation in various crimes against humanity. These acts, committed without any second thoughts as to their necessity in service to a just cause, don’t prevent Francis from joining the service of the French government, but they do weigh heavily enough on his soul for him to become obsessed by the people who, before and after him, took part on a much larger scale in slaughters, murders, rapes, and assorted war crimes.

After witnessing in The Hague the trial of an officer he fought under, Francis decides to become an amateur historian of the weirdest sort: he takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by his professional traveling and accumulates a vast archive of atrocity, some of it very exclusive and secret—names of victims and executioners, places and means, all of it encompassing the darkest side of the Mediterranean countries’ last 50 years. The briefcase charts his zone, both mental and geographical: from Gibraltar to Baghdad. But the man has seen enough and fully intends to drown his hopelessness, his weariness, and his disillusion in the riches afforded by his buyers, the agents of what he calls “the great archiver.”

With a description like that, I’m more interested in the novel itself than in its single-sentence conceit and I’d love to see this reviewed by Charles Simic or Daniel Goldhagen in NYRB. Until winter, freres et soeurs, satisfy yourself with one of Enard’s short stories, “Migration,” and this A/V introduction by the publisher and translator from Reading the World: