A great novel - but one I'm unlikely to re-read

Like the narrator (Francis) of Mathias Enard's novel Zone (2008), I, too, am glad to be nearing the end of this journey; the novel (aside from a few interpolated chapters that are from a book the narrator is reading) is entirely made up of a stream of consciousness flowing throughout the narrator's rr journey from Milan to Rome, over the course of which, following the narrator's career as a French secret agent and his service in the the Croat army during the Serbo-Croation war, plus his family history and extensive research, we experience a century of war crimes and crimes against humanity across all of the Mediterranean nations and Europe - a completely overwhelming accomplishment in a novel that leaves me and I imagine every reader drained and saddened - what a dark view of the world! All of us know of the some of these atrocities, of course, in particular the Nazi concentration camps, probably the epitome of all of these horrors, but to bring them all together in the course of one narrative makes for a completely misanthropic view of the world. Is there no peace, no redemption? Well, maybe - as Francis plans to turn over secret documents on war crimes to the Vatican and to begin a new life under a new name - so much depends on how Enard ends this novel. I think by every measure it's a great book, worthy of comparison w/ Melville and Joyce, but I also have to say it's not a book that I'll re-read, even though there's much I didn't "get" on first reading. It's monumental, but some monuments - like the several Holocaust museums, for example - are just too sorrowful to visit more than once.