The sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse.
—U.S. Army Field Manual No. 23–10
A young boy in a striped t-shirt squats behind a sedan with a blown-out tail light, using a small paper cup to collect water from a brackish puddle and transfer it into a Coca-Cola can. A man in a blue helmet raises his arm as he escorts a group of people past an armored personnel carrier. Two more men in blue helmets, the shirtfront of one washed with blood, billow a sheet to drape a prone figure. Several people run down a sidewalk toward a sunlit building, a large foregrounded sign reading: “PAZI SNAJPER.”
These scenes were captured in photographs taken in an area of Sarajevo that, from 1992 to 1996, was known as “sniper alley.” The name primarily referred to Ulica Zmaja od Bosne and Meša Selimović, streets that together form the city’s main boulevard, lined with high rises that served as nests for snipers who routinely terrorized civilians. While UN peacekeeping troops sometimes helped civilians cross and arranged vehicles to provide line-of-sight cover, sharpshooters were a perennial threat. By 1995, snipers had wounded over 1,000 people and officially killed 225, including 60 children. Children like seven-year-old Nermin Divovic, who was killed crossing a street in November 1994 when a bullet passed through his mother’s stomach and struck him in the head.
Earlier that year, two weeks into a ceasefire, a journalist with Time spoke to a Bosnian Serb sniper installed in the apartment of a displaced Muslim family. From his perch, he watched uneasily as people walked about with impunity. “Everyone likes peace except me,” he said. “I like the war.” He worried about the conditions of lasting peace, when snipers tended to be especially vilified. More fundamentally, he spoke as if the war had stolen some vital piece of himself: “I go from day to day, but nothing means anything. I don’t want a wife and children. I don’t want to think.” On the wall, a calendar was still open to October 1992, the month the family had fled.
Perhaps he would go to South Africa, where they were hiring people like him.
•
Mathias Énard’s Perfecting the Shot is not about Sarajevo, but it could be. The city in the novel is riven by civil war. Its neighborhoods are intermittently shelled, and its tallest buildings are occupied by snipers who “harass the enemy all day,” turning “simple avenues” into “uncrossable no-man’s-land.” Énard considered setting the novel explicitly in Beirut, where he traveled as a student to spend a month reporting on wartime conditions from a Red Cross ambulance. A first draft written years later named the city, down to its streets, and was narrated with bird’s eye omniscience.1 Dissatisfied, Énard revised the book to be at once more universal and particular. Thus, the published novel takes place in a nameless city—standing in for Beirut or Sarajevo or anywhere a population is murdering each other—and the narrator has his eye right up against a rifle scope.
Perfecting the Shot, Énard’s first novel, was originally published in France in 2003. It is his seventh novel to be translated into English, and the third by Charlotte Mandell. Compared to later works like Zone, a five-hundred-page book—largely constituting a single sentence—discharged by a speed-addled French intelligence agent on a train to Rome, or Compass, which comprises six hundred pages of an insomniac musicologist’s nocturnal musings in Vienna, Perfecting the Shot is relatively spare at 130-odd pages. Spare in other significant ways too. Typically, Énard’s novels are populated by the intelligentsia: citizens of the world, artists, and scholars who either move literally between cultures, or capably traverse a transportative, international realm of ideas. His texts are often interpolated with historical, artistic, and mythopoetic references, and the abiding sense is that however erudite one is, the world itself is more so, infinitely so. Not so here. In Perfecting the Shot’s world there are no musicologists nor poets nor scholars, no great tales nor symphonies nor plays. The characters are all either soldiers or immiserated civilians. War is the novel’s center and circumference.
The book’s narrator, like the city, is nameless. Barely eighteen, he lives in an apartment with his mother, who is succumbing to something like dementia. (Later in the book, he finds her sitting on the floor like a “little girl […] gently caressing the designs on the tiles, fascinated.”) At the novel’s outset, he has already proven his mettle as a sniper, having been gifted a fine rifle by a superior in exchange for killing a man who had, allegedly, been eyeing his wife (“a fat woman who no one in their right mind would have wanted,” our narrator thinks). While he still goes on maneuvers and works roadblocks—where civilians are stopped and shaken down for papers—he is most at ease with his rifle, at a comfortable remove: “Every morning, inserting cartridges into the magazine, calmly settled on top of the city, is a great pleasure.” He speaks of marksmanship as an art and as meditation. A connoisseur, he takes only the most difficult, pleasurable shots.
Installed on a rooftop, the narrator’s sole companion is the changeable, unchanging sea. Water, as a cleansing or enveloping or suspending force, is a recurring motif. A storm late in the novel promises at once to wash the city clean and, like Proust’s madeleine, to sound some nearly lost childhood register in the jaded narrator: “I thought rain, rain, rain, you who give pearls and death, or something like that, a song or a poem I had almost forgotten.” Similarly, it is in the narrator’s descriptions of the sea that we can spy a glimmer—like the brief, disclosive flare of a rifle scope catching the light—of a vulnerability somewhere inside him. A desire toward peace, or at least stasis:
I would spend hours looking at the sea from my roof. I’m not a romantic though, I’ve just always liked it. It changes color, it moves or remains motionless. For instance, the first summer of the war it didn’t move at all, it could barely produce the occasional wave. It was blinding blue all day and even at night you couldn’t hear the waves.
That said, we are made to understand from the beginning that the narrator is disposed (rather, conditioned) toward the cruel, concrete actions inherent to war. The neighbor who cares for his mother calls him a “killer” and grows more frightened of him by the day. When she repeats a rumor that snipers are targeting playgrounds, he lies, telling her he doesn’t do things like that: “I don’t know why I lied. But it was the beginning and no one realized that everything had changed for good.”
When his mother’s condition worsens, the neighbor stops coming over and the narrator has to hire a young girl, Myrna, to be her live-in caretaker. She is the fifteen-year-old daughter of an electrician killed by artillery, his store having been reduced, the narrator recalls flatly, to “a mixture of human remains and half burnt radios and televisions.” Though he initially balks at hiring someone so young, remarking that she looks even “younger than her age” and like “a child,” his perception of her almost immediately dilates. When she returns with her things and they sit together, he appreciates her olive skin and how, despite her childish face, she has an “almost” womanly body. The next night, sleepless, he steps out to smoke on a connecting balcony. Noticing her light, he approaches her window and watches her through the Persian blind:
She was thin, but not too skinny; her breasts were larger than her blouse made them seem, with very dark tips. Her legs were long and thin. She took off her pants, her back was turned to me, but I could also see her in the wardrobe mirror.
He is confused by conflicting impulses: a desire to lie with her, the knowledge that she is too young, an awareness that to do so he would have to violate her. He finally sleeps, and in sleep his unconscious churns darkly, transgressively. He awakes stiff and pained, full of “contradictory images.”
•
At one point, the narrator says he has three friends in the world: his rifle, the sea, and Zak, “in order of importance.” Zak is a fellow soldier, four years older and an accomplished brawler: “his thing was hand-to-hand combat, knives, fists.” Of a piece with this is his other characteristic, cruelty. When the two work roadblock detail, Zak enjoys taking the frightened civilians aside to beat and humiliate them:
I saw them reappear after a quarter of an hour, the driver stooping a little, limping, his face covered in tears, and Zak behind him, beaming, an amused smile on his face, he was making him walk forward by whipping his buttocks with an antenna, like the rump of a donkey.
He will go on to do far worse in the company of our protagonist. Still, they are comrades, bound by war and perhaps by something else too.
Early in the novel, the narrator recounts a night swim they once took together. Floating in the dark waters, their bodies the only discrete objects, they began to wrestle “like children.” Then time seemed to distend: artillery sounded in the background, the mountain caught fire, Zak passed a hand through the narrator’s hair and he gasped with pleasure. While this encounter is in some ways unique, it echoes other passages, like an artillery barrage the narrator weathers with Myrna, where in the midst of chaos there is the frail suggestion of some new intimacy, like a sparking lighter failing to catch. A fragile, unrealized conjecture that things could be otherwise, that this benighted, wartorn self could dissolve in some larger, more buoyant medium of human relations. When these episodes pass, and they inevitably do, the status quo returns.
As Myrna settles in and the narrator continues to grow in renown, they enter into a sort of faux courtship. He goes to the “office,” expends a certain number of cartridges, and comes home. Together, they take walks, get ice cream, sometimes even go to the movies. When the narrator takes her arm, she does not resist, which he chooses to interpret as a display of respect. He is content with this fantasy, Myrna less so. When she asks him what he will do when the war ends, he is unable to answer, unable to conceive of such a thing:
I’d answer I had no idea; war had become a permanent state, the world, our lives, our habits had changed too much. I don’t know, I’d say to her, I think we could emigrate or something. […] ‘I have a good job now,’ I said.
In narration, he observes that the city trembles with life in periods of calm, as if the shellings and strife give people a “reason” to appreciate the peace.
It becomes increasingly clear that the narrator’s life is composed of irreconcilable things held in a necessary tension. He desires intimacy but recoils from true vulnerability, desires proximity but is most himself at a sniper’s remove. He speaks of his marksmanship as at once creating a direct relationship between himself and things, and as an emptying of his selfhood into the firearm. He does seem to want peace, but only a peace that is dialectically yoked to a workaday war. In this way, he lives with his rifle’s trigger held in the window of creep—that mechanism of intentional “give” before the sear releases and the firing pin falls. When, later in the novel, he begins to take seriously the idea that killing Myrna’s aunt could solve a problem, he becomes a symbol of war’s fundamental, insoluble paradox: namely, the notion that the terms of peace can be established through systematic murder.
All of which is to say: Perfecting the Shot is a hard book to recommend in any carefree sense. Absent the rich cultural and historical touchstones of Ernard’s later works, it is a relentlessly narrow and dark novel. Its narrator is piloted by crude desires and indoctrinated by violence. We watch him kill civilians, terrorize Red Cross workers trying to administer aid. When he does find himself drawn toward complex, tender emotions like empathy or love, his psyche inevitably skids back into well-worn grooves. The anger is always there behind the sadness, he says, like a shadow. And yet, stark as it is, the novel’s translation at this historical moment resonates uncannily. A sharp report, like small-arms fire.
•
In the 2000s and early 2010s, documentary evidence of extreme violence was treated like political contraband, for the most part relegated to dark web-adjacent sites like LiveLeak. You could find grisly videos, of cartel or terroristic or just horribly random origin, but you had to go digging in the poorly lit muck. In that climate, where the violence we heard about was often vaguely elsewhere, in black sites or desertified regions, it was a staggering irruption when the Abu Ghraib detainee—frocked and hooded, electrode-wired hands outstretched in a faltering cruciform—was broadcast on 60 Minutes. Like an emissary from a place, a moral depth, we mostly refused to bear witness to.
Fast-forward to today, and it feels hard to escape images of violence—and, moreover, its wanton celebration. Tech bros showcase single-charge assassination robots on conference stages and governments release recruitment “trailers” for actual wars, cut with first-person footage resembling Call of Duty. A video at the top of my Twitter feed shows “dragon drones” spraying molten thermite across an Eastern European landscape; another shakily records a journalist, clearly marked as press, being beaten by a mob. The feed refreshes, interminably: a housing block hit with a ballistic missile; the halfheartedly pixelated aftermath of an active shooter in a Tex Mex restaurant; a group of police officers discharging their Glocks into a lone woman with a knife. On Instagram, there is a carousel of grainy images: a soldier crouching in a culvert, grimacing candidly beneath a grey sky; another, nearly prone in a field, his scowling face wrenched fatally toward the camera. Final captures from FPV drones, digitized death masks that operators can upload to a kill confirmation database, which awards them points to be exchanged for armaments. Like “Vampire” drones, which cost 43 tokens and can be delivered to the front in under a week. With mechanical disinterest, the feed refreshes.
Amid all this, it can sometimes feel as if the scenario Cronenberg imagined in Videodrome, and which David Foster Wallace riffed on in “The Suffering Channel”—an obscure television signal broadcasting plotless sequences of torture and ultraviolence—has broken fictional containment, metastasizing from innumerable bespoke sources across millions of small, retinal-display screens. All powered by code that is no respecter of age. Last year, the Guardian reported on the way violence—footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, stabbings, cars driven into crowds, kidnappings and war zones—was being pushed algorithmically onto the feeds of children not expressly searching for it. As a fourteen-year-old girl told content safety researchers: “On TikTok you can see stabbings and kidnappings, which are just not nice to see, especially when you are a bit younger, it makes you feel uncomfortable.”
Perhaps this novel feels particularly timely because Perfecting the Shot is, in a fundamental way, a book about children bearing witness to violence and being irrevocably transformed by it. As the narrator says: “I remember well, for me the war began sooner than for the others, it began with the death of my father, when I was fifteen.” Standing on his balcony, watching Myrna walk along the street, he muses further:
I thought that for her too, the war had started when that shell had picked off her father, and even though she was a girl she must have felt the same thing that I had. Little by little she must have gotten used to it, changed to look like the world around us, control her fear, learn to know herself, dominate herself.
In our spectacular media culture—where, per Debord, these images of violence join with all other commodity-images into one “common stream” of unified disunity—it is no longer the unique purview of soldiers to have seen too much. We too can watch, powerless, and then scroll on. Perhaps the next image, the next terror, pricks our conscience that infinitesimal bit less. “You must abstract yourself from the world,” Énard’s narrator advises, “withdraw little by little into the unreal recess of the sights until you become lost in the infinite reflections of the lenses.”
And perhaps too it is in that scroll away, in that prehensile, almost precognitive, flick of the thumb and the granular cut between images, in the catechismic flicker of our foreshortened face caught in the smartphone’s glass darkly, that we can begin, faintly, to understand our narrator’s advice—the contraction of attention and the involution of sight, the rarefaction away of emotion into pure ether, into almost nothing at all, that is required to succeed as a sniper of the highest order.
- This, and other facts related to the book’s genesis, were gleaned from an October 2026 conversation between Nicole Krauss and Énard that took place at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. ↩︎
Philip Harris
Philip Harris is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. He studies figurative painting in New Hampshire, and sometimes writes. He can be reached at harrisphilipe@gmail.com.