Among the most ambitious novels I have ever read: Enard's Zone

It's hard to overstate the achievement of Mathias Enard's novel, Zone (2008, may have had date wrong in previous post), which one of the jacket blurbs compares with Moby-Dick and which I would also compare w/ Ulysses - by any measure it stands up well against any of the great Modern masterpieces, and written by a 30-something author? Surely it would have drawn more attention across the world if it were written in English, but so be it. I'm not quite half-way done reading this 500-page novel, so things can change over the course of a narrative, but to this point it's among the most impressive novels I've read in years - yet this should come with  significant caveat. This novel is not for all readers - it's intensely demanding, full of information and geographic locations that will be obscure to many readers, in particular non-Europeans (including this one). Maybe it demands more than one reading - there's no way one could "get" it all  on first pass-through (also true of Ulysses). But serious readers of contemporary fiction should give Zone its due. Part of the challenge arises directly from Enard's narrative technique: the entire novel is told from within the consciousness of the narrator and occurs over the course of several hours as he travels by train from Milan to Rome. Because this novel is entirely stream-of-consciousness, many of the conventions of narrative are over-ridden. For example, in most novels, if you read through the first, say, 50 pages, you'll have a good sense of the narrator, his or her back story, the direction of the plot. This novel dispenses w/ back-story and w/ conventional episodic development. Rather, it's as if we're in the mind of a man taking stock of his whole life, not sequentially but the way one would do over the course of a long meditation (cf Joyce/Molly Bloom) - so his background and his life experiences get filled in as we go, something like the gradual increasing clarity of a puzzle being pieced together. The narrator , we learn, is traveling under and assumed name and is en route to the Vatican to deliver a suitcase containing the names of and information about several thousand war criminals. The narrator is or was an employ of the French equivalent of the CIA and he formerly served in the Croate army during the war against Serbia. Over the course of his life - military service and many spy missions (to among other places Syria, Israel/Lebanon) he has witnessed, and recalls for us, numerous atrocities and crimes against humanity; similarly, his father served with the French in Algeria and had witnessed (and maybe participated in) atrocities and war crimes - and the narrator also recalls and recounts other horrors of the 20th century in Europe, including both World Wars and in particular the Nazi concentration campus. So this is an astonishingly dark novel, but also among the most ambitious novels I've ever read (cf Melville/Moby-Dick), encompassing an entire continent and century of history in its scope. My several comparisons don't do this novel full justice; it's really sui generis.