Matthias Enard's novel Compass (2015), which brought the writer the Goncourt Prize - like a carpet-plane floating freely over Vienna and Istanbul, Paris and Baghdad - reveals to us the East, delightful, mesmerizing, fragrant, which has long attracted European artists, composers, poets. This whole voluminous epic novel is enclosed in the framework of one sleepless night, a night of memories and real danger, because the main characters of the book, the melancholy Franz and the beautiful Sarah, are firsthand familiar with a different East: alarming, stained with the blood of old wars and explosions of current confessional conflicts. These armchair researchers, talking about Debussy and Bartok, Nizami and Hugo, are attracted by distant wanderings, the arrow of their compass stubbornly points to the East, but are they destined to coincide at one point in an unobservable space, or will the Arab connection of their destinies never merge into a single text?..