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Dizzying read. Had to check several times that, yes, it’s not a made-up allegory on something or other... but an actual biography.
It's not quite a traditional biography, but it is a fascinating & fast-moving look at the man (admirable? reprehensible? both? neither?). Worth reading, especially for fans of world/international politics, outcasts, & rabble-rousers.
A unique first-person biography that covers exactly what the subtitle says it’s about. A sort of modern picaresque about a pesky, punker Russian poet who believes he's destined for greatness but for the most part finds himself down and out. About complexities of character and the nature of reality when skewed by ambition and either/or ideation about everyone else. Got it because it was highly recommended to me within a few weeks by three writers whose opinions I fully trust. Almost quit it about...
Fuck it, who could have known this book would shake my world so much. I wonder what makes a look at a person’s life in this title so charismatic- is it the person who’s being written about, or is it the writer? Or is it both which makes the whole experience even more devastatingly consuming? I guess, this is how great books are written, all the ingredients are just right.Thing with Limonov is that however you feel about him, you’re still in the wrong because he is, was, a person of contradiction...
I read this book only halfway and then decided I have a better use of my time.it is very very linear. Limonov did this. then he did that. the following day he went there. he did this. then he did that. the end.
Wild ride memoir of a figure who can’t be pinned down. This is the most effaced I’ve seen Carrere the narrator (even in the superior THE ADVERSARY, I feel his presence. His main intervention is with the one central question that keeps recurring: Are we following a vile sociopath, or a brilliant chameleon? Limonov is at once racist, facist, and gay icon, Buddhist writer and jingoistic combatant. I am sure that he is a less rollicking figure than the cover text would have you think.I was disturbed...
3.5/5It didn't me long (about twenty pages I think) to discover that Russian renegade Eduard Limonov was a bit of a dickhead. No sooner had I thought 'OK, maybe he isn't that bad afterall' I wanted to kick him where it hurts moments later. That's not to say I didn't relish in reading of his exhilarating escapades, because I did. And that really is all down to Carrère's verve and passion for his subject. There were times when even he had a distaste for him, and he sits on the fence for the most p...
I hate writing a review for a three-star book. It can be great fun to write about the books you really didn't like and to write about the books that you really did like, but it's writing about the books that leave you feeling rather indifferent that's the challenge, and this is exactly how "Limonov" made me feel.The problem with the book is no small one: it's Limonov himself.Limonov, the "radical Soviet poet" heralded in the book's insanely long subtitle, is simply one of the most unlikeable cha...
Unable to get hold of a copy, I read a Kobo preview of this book, which I discovered quite by chance, whilst browsing through a list of titles. The name "Limonov" struck me as vaguely familiar. After a few moments, I remembered: Limonov, of course, the Soviet poet and gay icon of the 80s! An alluring figure that was a "bum" in New York and the darling of French intellectuals. What I didn't know, and found out from Carrère's book, was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Limonov had fough...
A weird book about a really weird and unsympathetic man. I’m not sure that Limonov is worth a book, but if he is, it sure was written by the right guy. The book with its stupid hero is well-written, exciting, surrealistic and funny. I totally get the hype.
Brilliant book about what I consider to be an awful man, despite the author quite openly trying to convince me to like him. I find Carrere's books to be very hit or miss but he has a really enjoyable approach to biography in both this and his Philip K Dick book.
By and large this is quite a story and what a life this man led. Limonov was many things to many people at many times, Kharkovite bohemian, a tailor, author, convert, poet, prisoner, politician?...pretend soldier?...lover, husband, father, fascist, communist and capitalist?...In many ways this has all the hallmarks of a sprawling Victorian novel or bildungsroman epic. Zapoi (extended Russian drinking sessions which last days) tales, which spawned all sorts of monsters and disasters. With many ex...
A sort of dual literary/historical biography and autobiography, Carrere recounts the life of a shockingly worldly right wing agitator while at the same time discussing aspects of his own life, of how Russia in the 90s looked to actual Russians, and of his own simultaneous admiration and disgust with his subject.Limonov is sort of like a punky Russian Celine: a misanthropic fascist whose disgust with the world comes from having seen and lived in so many bizarre, twisted parts of it that it boggle...
Time is too fresh to have rehabbed Limonov, he's only been dead a year, and only a few of his books were ever even translated to English, all impossible or near impossible to find today. In life he never kowtowed to the idea of what a respectable writer should be, past anything admirable, into absurdity and worse. Until this month's release of the new Adam Curtis documentary, which features him as a main character, I don't think anybody in the English-speaking world had tried to reconcile his bi...
