The French novelist Mathias Énard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it. Énard speaks Persian and Arabic, and he has taught at universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region, a “zone,” as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine books, three of which have been translated into English, he has charted a course through this zone, writing about sectarian violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism, tradition, and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue’s gallery of thieves, killers, and eccentrics. Énard’s prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (“Zone” is a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But it’s the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Énard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.

In his latest novel, “Compass,” which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, Énard trains his eye on the relationship between Europe and the Middle East. His narrator is Franz Ritter, a middle-aged Austrian musicologist who reconsiders his life and loves during one long, painful night of insomnia in his apartment in Vienna. Each chapter opens with a time stamp, and over the course of the interminable night, Franz recalls his travels through the Middle East, with frequent, relentlessly erudite digressions about music, literature, and the history of Oriental scholarship.

Besotted with Istanbul, Damascus, and Tehran, where he’s lived and travelled extensively, Franz is an Orientalist of a certain type. He seems to have wrestled his way past the moral challenges of post-colonial theory—the charges of privilege, appropriation, political naïveté, and so on—to arrive at a deep and self-conscious affinity for Middle Eastern music and art. He has “a revolutionary thesis no one cares about,” he says: that the great flowering of European classical music beginning in the eighteenth century “owed everything to the Orient.” Franz credits Napoleon, whom he calls “the inventor of Orientalism . . . the one who drags science behind his army into Egypt and makes Europe penetrate the Orient beyond the Balkans for the first time.” Literature and art—along with colonial domination, Napoleon’s military defeat notwithstanding—follow. The influence can be seen everywhere in the following years: Liszt, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Nietzsche—practically any cultural figure of consequence from the period (and many that have been forgotten) imbibed some Middle Eastern influence, incorporating foreign stories, songs, or poetic forms into his art. “All these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy.”

Bastardy is beauty, in Franz’s aesthetic vision. That vision is largely shared by Sarah, a fellow-scholar and dear friend with whom Franz is in love, though he can’t bring himself to tell her. “All of Europe is in the Orient,” Sarah says. “Everything is cosmopolitan, interdependent.” Énard, drawing on a formidable well of research, spots and elucidates Eastern influence throughout the Western canon, finding hybridity everywhere. “Don Quixote” is “the first European novel and the first Arabic novel,” he argues: Cervantes, in a metafictional flourish, credited the story to a Moorish man, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Comte de Gobineau, the inventor of Aryanism, was an Orientalist (and a close friend of Richard Wagner). European neoclassical architecture drew inspiration from photographs of the ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra: “a little of the Syrian desert lived secretly in London, Paris and Vienna.”

Franz himself, even in his memories, is mostly a passive figure, riffing on nineteenth-century archaeologists or Proust’s debt to “A Thousand and One Nights.” He generally refrains from self-criticism, though he has a wry, humble attitude about the bloated self-importance of Western scholars. “Just because the Ottomans have been at your gates twice doesn’t necessarily mean you become the gateway to the Orient,” he says of his native Vienna. As Franz’s colleagues debate the question of Orientalism, the book’s few thesis statements—e.g., “The Orient is an imaginal construction, an ensemble of representations from which everyone picks what they like, wherever they are”—issue from the mouths of supporting characters. And looming above it all, like a professor who’s just been disappointed by his star pupil, is Edward Said, the Palestinian-American writer who helped found postcolonial studies. On one boozy night in Palmyra, Franz remembers, “Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent.” A self-aggrandizing German scholar named Bilger, “horrified at the idea that he could be associated with any kind of Orientalism, immediately began an embarrassed auto-criticism, renouncing everything.” Others in their group are more qualified in their judgments of Said. As for Franz, he has no opinion, though he notes, dryly, “Edward Said was an excellent pianist.”

The light, needling tone reflects Énard’s delicate approach to the politics of Orientalism—and to the region’s authoritarian rulers. Franz is a thoughtful observer but largely absent of strong political convictions, unlike some of his colleagues, who throw themselves into Iran’s revolutionary protests. Franz mentions the political conditions in the Middle Eastern autocracies he travels through, but much of the book takes place in the cocoon of the region’s restaurants, courtyards, universities, and cultural salons. Violence, conflict, and oppression lie elsewhere. Here and there, however, it breaks through Franz’s nostalgic reveries:

. . . impossible, in Paris in 1999, with a glass of champagne in hand, to imagine that Syria would be devastated by the worst violence, that the Aleppo souk would burn down, the minaret of the mosque of the Omayyads collapse, so many friends would die or be forced to go into exile; impossible even today to imagine the amplitude of the damage, the scope of this suffering from a comfortable, silent Viennese apartment.

On a trip through the Syrian countryside, Franz, Sarah, and Bilger drive past a ragtag group of Syrian soldiers conducting maneuvers. Once again, imagination fails them, as they begin making fun of a group of soldiers sitting by a broken-down truck. “The Assad regime and his tanks seemed to us like cardboard boys, marionettes . . . we did not see, beyond the apparent dilapidation of the army and the leaders, the reality of fear, death, and torture appearing behind the posters, the possibility of destruction and extreme violence behind the omnipresence of soldiers, badly dressed as they were.”