#RivetingReviews: Cory Anderson reviews PERFECTING THE SHOT by Mathias Enard, translated by Charlotte Mandell
The world becomes small, your breath sharpens and the stillness of the moment sits close around your ears. An inhale, a sharp crack, an exhale. From rooftops and windows, in Perfecting the Shot, Mathias Énard sits us next to an unnamed sniper, fighting in an unspecified war, in an unnamed country, in an unknown city. The nameless soldier sees himself more as an artist than a blood-thirsty warrior. The precision of his violence makes it a craft: he will not simply kill; he will kill beautifully.
The novel feels uneasy, and I was left unsettled by the dichotomy of the narrator’s split persona. He’s a technician more than a killer, discussing his breath, the wind, shot distance, sight adjustment. Whether he’s shooting birds, enemy soldiers or civilians in the street, he never wavers in his language or scientific approach. When we’re with him, in his sniper’s nest, the prose becomes almost meditative. Serene. And it’s this serenity that makes the novel so ghastly. You as reader become so mindful of the buffer – the comfortable distance – between the shooter and his victim, that you are painfully aware of your own cushion between the violence of war and yourself.
The narrator is just a boy – a boy who has learned to substitute his own morality with technique; he’s entirely lost the distinction between right and wrong, sees only a good shot or a bad one. Ultimately, the book is about control in the most chaotic of circumstances. The boy’s life is wrecked beyond recognition by the war, and he is no longer the same person as a result. One is left pitying him and simultaneously reeling in revulsion.
We swing between his life on the front and his life at home, where he lives with his mentally ill mother. It’s easy to sense the difficulty he has squaring his home life with his work, and he feels more burdened by his mother than he is upset by her condition. Then there is Myrna: fifteen years old and orphaned, she falls prey to the narrator, and there is a growing uneasiness as we follow his fascination with her, which terminates in obsession and disaster.
Perfecting the Shot is a book of double standards. The narrator’s own morality is completely broken. His closest (and only) friend, Zak, disgusts him with the vulgarity of his actions, but when he does the same things, he cannot see an issue with it. We, as readers, are left puzzling over our own morality – how can we judge the desperate actions of a young boy in a time of death, destruction and war if we have not had to deal with these things ourselves?
As the narrator perfects his shot, he loses his grip on the rest of his life. He hones his aim while losing direction. Unable to master his own life, he becomes a purveyor of death.
Énard writes all of this with a prose that is remarkably controlled. There is lyricism here, but it is a cold lyricism, the beauty of something seen from too great a distance. The sentences move with the same concentration as the sniper. It is this composed prose that makes Charlotte Mandell’s translation particularly impressive. The narrator’s voice is precise without becoming flat, lyrical without becoming beautiful in any comfortable sense. Mandell preserves the strange tension that weaves from page to page. The sentences can feel clipped and mechanical one moment, almost hypnotic the next, as though the language itself is being trained to behave like the rifle. There is very little wasted movement. Even when the narrator is drifting into memory or fantasy, there is the sensation that he is lining something up in his sights. Subsequently, the English is exact, cutting like a scalpel across the lines.
Perfecting the Shot is a short book, but it leaves a long impression. It is not interested in explaining war so much as showing what happens when war becomes ordinary, when killing becomes work, when a young person discovers that destruction is the one thing he can do perfectly. The lingering image of the book is of looking through a scope: the world becomes hyper focused and magnified, but only within the narrow circle of your sight.
Reviewed by Cory Anderson
PERFECTING THE SHOT
Written by Mathias Enard
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (2026)
September 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Cory Anderson is a freelance writer, editor and recent graduate of University College London, with a degree in Modern Foreign Languages.
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