El banquete anual de la Cofradía de Sepultureros

To work on his doctoral thesis on life in the country today, the ethnographer David Mazon has left Paris to settle for a year in a remote village surrounded by marshes on the west coast of France. While overcoming the discomforts of the rural world, David makes contact with the colorful locals who frequent the café-colmado to interview them. They are headed by Martial, the mayor gravedigger, and the host of the traditional banquet of the members of the Brotherhood of Gravediggers. In this gargantuan feast where wines and delicacies go hand in hand with legends, songs and disputes about the future of the funeral service, Death curiously offers them three days of truce. The rest of the year, when the Grim Reaper takes hold of someone, the Wheel of Life throws their soul back into the world, to a future or past time, as an animal or as a human being, so that the Wheel continues to turn. In this splendid and multifaceted novel, which combines great doses of humor and the author's already well-known erudition in equal measure, Mathias Enard exhumes the turbulent past and the treasures of his native France, traveling through the last millennium of its history, but without losing sight of In view of contemporary fears and with the hope of a tomorrow in which the human being is in harmony with the planet.