A Life in Fiction: Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov
Leading the Reading Group at the Institut français is proving to be an incredibly enjoyable experience. With reading being a solitary – some might say anti-social – activity, the opportunity to club together to talk about books is always welcome. What is more, we learn to read more critically when we talk about what we’re reading with others.
Up for discussion on Thursday 3 December was Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère, described by Robert McCrum in the Observer as the ‘most important French writer you’ve never heard of’. Born in 1957 in Paris, Carrère is the son of historian and member of the Académie française, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. Following his studies and military service, Carrère became a film critic for magazine Télérama and published a monograph on director Werner Herzog in 1982. His first novel, L’Amie du jaguar, came out a year later with Flammarion.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Carrère has also written and directed for the screen, and his works of fiction have gradually begun to blur the lines between life-writing and novel writing, fiction and biography. Published in 2011 by semi-independent publishing house POL (it belongs to the Gallimard group), Limonov is one such ‘peculiar book’.
The protagonist, Eduard Limonov, is a larger than life character who run the gamut of experiences from being a bad boy in the Ukraine to a tramp in New York, from living it up as a literary sensation in Paris to being imprisoned as a political rebel in Moscow. It seems incredible that he has managed to pack that much into his life: so much so that a number of people in the Reading Group even doubted the existence of this modern-day Don Quixote.
Certainly he’s had a more adventurous life than Carrère, and this contrast between their two lives is clearly what fascinated the writer. It gave him scope to apply narrative storytelling techniques, to revel in the Romanesque and follow a hero cum anti-hero whose crazy life somehow acts as a metaphor for the muddled history of Russia during and post USSR. Indeed, as Yasmina Reza writes in Le Monde the book is fundamentally about Russia.
In our free-flowing discussion, we covered almost as much ground as the Trans Siberian Express from questioning narrative voice, to examining literary traditions and unpicking contemporary history. We considered our expectations of literature and confronted our preconceptions. In short, we had a fascinating and enlightening literary discussion.
Now, as our attention turns to the festive season, you might want to ask Santa to put La Carte et le Territoire and Soumission by Michel Houellebecq in your stocking. They’re both up for discussion at the next session on 14 Jan.
Dominic Glynn is Lecturer in French at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR).