Limonov
2011
First Published
4.12
Average Rating
400
Number of Pages
A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia's most controversial figures This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a I suspend my judgment on the matter. It's a dangerous life, an ambiguous a real adventure novel. It is also, I believe, a life that says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about all our history since the end of the Second World War." So Eduard Limonov isn't fictional―but he might as well be. This pseudobiography isn't a novel, but it reads like from Limonov's grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia's literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York, then to Paris; to his return to the motherland. Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality, that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.
Avg Rating
4.12
Number of Ratings
14,050
5 STARS
37%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Emmanuel Carrère
Author · 19 books
Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director. He is the son of Louis Carrère d'Encausse and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Carrère studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po). Much of his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, centers around the primary themes of the interrogation of identity, the development of illusion, and the direction of reality. Several of his books have been made into films; in 2005, he personally directed the film adaptation of his novel La Moustache. He was the president of the jury of the book Inter 2003. (Wikipedia)
