TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS

By Mathias Énard

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

144 pp. New Directions. $19.95.

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Énard imagines that in 1506, Michelangelo Buonarroti steps away from his work on the tomb of Pope Julius II, and from the vagaries of his powerful patron, to travel to Constantinople at the invitation of the Sultan Bayezid to design a bridge across the Golden Horn. The author presents a few alluring pieces of evidence, pulled from archives, to suggest that such a thing could have happened — mention of an invitation by Michelangelo’s biographer, travel journals the sculptor sent his brother, a recently uncovered sketch — but the rest is a rush of invention of a kind that is conceivable from few other contemporary writers. There is a lush materiality to Énard’s prose, thick and smooth, so that following the artist’s expeditions through Ottoman opium dens feels nearly as immersive as being in them. Michelangelo’s guide is an ingratiating poet named Mesihi who chauffeurs him to what he calls the “Santa Sophia Basilica” — today known as the Hagia Sophia — and to outdoor markets where animals are sold alongside men and to an evening concert where Michelangelo is drawn into an infatuation with an androgynous dancer whose sex he is unable to decipher.

There is an unsubtle quality to Énard’s insistence on fluidity — between male and female, and especially between East and West — and his past work is invariably mentioned in the same breath as Orientalism, though it’s not so easy to articulate the precise relationship. But reading “Tell Them of Battles,” originally published in French in 2010, feels somehow radical in 2018, provoking a kind of wistfulness at the wonder and uncertainty that Michelangelo experiences in his confrontation with foreignness in “this disturbing city, at once familiar and resolutely other,” and the novelty of his artistic discovery, such as when “the always surprising voices of those human church bells on top the minarets confirm for him, along with the shadows lengthening on his page, that the sun has just set.” After all, the Taj Mahal was partly designed by a Turk, the most important cathedral of the Kremlin built by an Italian. “Beauty comes from abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present,” Énard’s Michelangelo says to himself as he sits down to sketch out a viaduct that never will be.