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The most remarkable quality of this memoir is the elegant, light-handed way that Carrere weaves together the many threads of his story. The book asks serious questions about relationship and ethics without ever seeming to do so.
It is marketed as a memoir and it has the ring of truth. It is not stranger than fiction, but it is strange. These events might have happened; maybe some of them happened or they happened in a different way. There is the story the author is telling and then there is the portrait of the author.If what he says is true, the author wears his self-absorption like a crown. He speaks of his insecurities, his fantasies, his enjoyment in manipulating Sophie and more. He does not see the intrusions he is
He is so self-involved he has no consideration for either of the women in his life for whom who he publicly publishes letters. He shows open disdain for the middle class, but makes no case for the privileged class being in any way better. He comes off as a hypocritical double-standarded sexist with, despite his honesty in describing how awful he is, no apparent understanding of how awful he is. The sex story he seemed so proud of was eye-rollingly juvenile. He criticizes a critic for being too i...
Let's talk about Carrere's ego and emmanuel's mother dissapointment.
Semi-disastrous structurally, but with enough good writing and Carrere-style free-associative confession/analysis to keep me going. This is by far the weakest of his hybrid non-fiction works that I've read (I adored THE KINGDOM and thought THE ADVERSARY was gripping), and the problem is essentially one of balance: the most interesting thing in the book is the opening - a Hungarian man has been locked in a Russian sanitarium for 50 years; the second most interesting plot is Carrere's grandfather,...
It is kind of hard to separate the bad things about the book from my negative opinion of the author (which came from reading the book), but I guess I'll just go for it. This guy is a self-absorbed narcissist. Maybe if he were a better writer he could have made himself seem more likable. I appreciate that he was being honest about his insecurities, but really he just came off as whiney. And SO SELF-ABSORBED. He seems to recognize that he didn't actually participate in making the documentary about...
I don't know why I finished this novel when I had to struggle through it especially the beginning. If Carrere has limited the novel to his film making in Russia, it would have been more interesting. His love story about Sophie seemed to be that of an adolescent instead of a 40 yr. old man. Basically a dark depressing memoir filled with anger, angst and doubt.
No one writes about love like the French – and this isn't exactly a compliment. I'm thinking of Sophie Calle's Exquisite Pain, Annie Ernaux's The Passion and Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, but even those depressive tales can't match Emmanuel Carrère's vivisection in My Life as a Russian Novel."I can't stand being this peevish child who longs to be consoled, who plays at hatred to win love, threatens to leave to avoid being abandoned. I can't tolerate being like that, and I resent you fo...
Favorite quotes from this book:"I can't stand being this peevish child who longs to be consoled, who plays at hatred to win love, threatens to leave to avoid being abandoned. I can't tolerate being like that, and I resent you for making me like that." page 229"How nice that would be! And how easy, if we decided to do that! But I know myself too well: before long I'd begin to worry that my jealous and possessive middle class girlfriend was cutting me off from everything and turning me into a prov...
There are some great bits in this book - the parts in Russia and about the film are good, and feel true (it's supposed to be a diary). The parts about his girlfriend do not - possessive, spiteful, spoilt - can this really be a grown-up? Maybe it's too male for me? Disappointing.
I think my attraction to the writings of the contemporary French writer Emmanuel Carrère has come to an end—and just as the New York crowd has begun to embrace him (judging from both NYRB and NYT). The question his work raises for me is this: how far can autobiographical writing go before it becomes exploitative and even obscene? Not all of us will draw the line in the same place, but I suspect all of us will draw a line somewhere. Carrère has always used those around him, even those with whom h...
The rather polarized response to this book fascinates me. One of the first reviews I read questions the honesty of the author (it's a fucking memoir!) time and again. Many others lambaste him for his honesty - because he is selfish, brash, inconsiderate, given to bouts of the erotic that must for some verge on lewdness. In considering these critiques, I can't help but be reminded of Carrere's countryman Michel Houellebecq, whose book Elementary Particles is the most hotly debated title I've ever...
From my review in the TLS:Much about A Russian Novel by French journalist, writer and director Emmanuel Carrère is misleading on its face. First of all, it seems it isn’t a novel, but a memoir. Russia is in the title because of a documentary Carrère films there and the fact that his grandfather was a Georgian immigrant. A Russian Novel is otherwise very unlike a Russian novel: it is not structured to raise the intense moral questions about reason, free will, and spiritual identity most people eq...
