num_pages: 448
description: As night falls over Vienna Franz Ritter an insomniac musicologist takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul Aleppo Damascus and Tehran as well as the various writers artists musicians academics orientalists and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive love Sarah a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition Mathias nard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sourcesnineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists Balzac and Agatha Christieand binds them together in a most magical way.
language: English
title: Compass
publisher: New Directions