Matthias Henard’s novel “Compass” (2015), which brought the writer the Goncourt Prize, like a flying carpet freely soaring over Vienna and Istanbul, Paris and Baghdad, reveals to us the East, intoxicating, bewitching, fragrant, which has long attracted European artists , composers, poets. This entire voluminous epic novel is framed within the framework of one sleepless night, a night of memories and real danger, because the main characters of the book, the melancholic Franz and the beautiful Sarah, are familiar firsthand with a different East: alarming, stained with the blood of long-standing wars and the explosions of current confessional conflicts. These armchair researchers, talking about Debussy and Bartok, Nizami and Hugo, are attracted by distant travels, the needle of their compass stubbornly points to the East, but are they destined to coincide at one point in the vast space, or will the Arabic script of their destinies never merge into a single text? ..