Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère

Abstract

76 | World Literature Today reviews It’s hard to praise this book too much and even more difficult to select passages for quotation: one wants to quote the entire book. Still, here’s the final passage from a poem, “The Mole,” in which, terminally ill, the speaker “has become / nothing but / a collection of quiet / tics and twitches / as if something / wanted out / of his riddled bones . . . as if joy / were the animal / in him, blind, / scrabbling, earth- / covered creature / tunneling / up from God / knows where to stand / upright, feasting / on distances, gazing / dead into the sun.” What supremely intelligent lineation we see here, compounding meaning. In “A Good Landscape for Grief,” we read: “a moment / opens and opens in the end / of days like a rose / on which a bee in all its hirsute specificity / has landed, its feelers feeling / everything as it crawls slowly inside, / and never comes out.” These poems will stun you into admiration, despair, joy, laughter, anger, and deep sobriety as you accompany the speaker into the prospect of his final hours, wondering if you yourself will have the dignity, honesty, and insight that he has, who, having endured, though riven, is somehow made whole. Fred Dings University of South Carolina miscellaneous Emmanuel Carrère. Limonov. Paris. P.O.L. 2011. isbn 9782818014059 The Prix Théophraste-Renaudot is one of the five major literary prizes in France, second only to the Prix Goncourt in terms of the prestige it confers . Created in 1926, the Renaudot is typically awarded to a novel. This year marks an exception, because the prize went to Emmanuel Carrère for Limonov. The latter is decidedly not a novel (though it makes many gestures in the direction of the novel); rather, it is a biography. The fact that it should win the Renaudot testifies to how embattled the very idea of the novel is on the contemporary cultural horizon, where in recent years that form has been influenced in key ways by genres once imagined to be quite distinct from it: biography , autobiography, testimony, travel writing, historiography, journalism, and so forth. Carrère’s book focuses on the life of Eduard Limonov, and indeed a more “novelistic” life could hardly be imagined. Born in the Russian provinces in 1943, he was by turns a hooligan, a homeless poet, an exile, a majordomo to a New York billionaire , a soldier in dubious combat, an avant-garde memoirist, an unrepentant Stalinist, a political prisoner, a dissident among dissidents, and the founder of the National Bolshevik Party. Carrère is clearly fascinated by his subject, but that fascination is significantly distressed. He admires the man’s courage and strength of purpose on the one hand; on the other, he deplores his tendencies toward fascism and his unwavering sympathy for the Serbian cause in former Yugoslavia. Throughout the book, Carrère frets about his own motives, never quite coming to satisfactory terms with his decision to write on Limonov. In certain inevitable ways, Limonov forces Carrère to consider himself anew, and that process is an intriguing one, especially for those readers familiar with Carrère’s previous work. He recognizes in Limonov a writer determined to account for the world as he imagines it to be, and perhaps it is that which engages Carr ère so closely, as he himself searches for new ways to describe the world around us, beyond the confines of the traditional novel. Warren Motte University of Colorado Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage. James Marcus, ed. New York. Columbia University Press. 2011. isbn 9780231159319 Sometimes one forgets that opening a newspaper begs a suspension of disbelief. It’s certainly more subtle a demand than that of a Phillip K. Dick novel or some tale of dystopian apocalypse, but it does necessitate the passing of your critical-thinking reins to a beat reporter, a foreign correspondent, or some other such person “embedded” amid faraway action. That is, if a good story’s what you’re looking for. Thankfully, Second Read’s assembled troupe of Pulitzer Prize winners, contributors to the Columbia Journalism Review, professional journalists, and authors of fiction steers well clear of the intrepid...