Emmanuel Carrère is a rascal. He traps the reader with all sorts of narrative cunning. In The Kingdom, for example, he novelizes the life of Saint Paul and the first Christians, but also narrates the depression caused by a girlfriend who abandons him; and how he surpasses her thanks to another girl, a Catholic.
In one of the episodes, he visits the island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the book of Revelation. After visiting the saint’s cave, he returns to his apartment. He is alone. He opens the computer and looks for porn. He describes in detail the body of a stripper. Carrère is cultured and vulgar at the same time; deep and superficial; exquisite and obscene.
In A Russian Novel, he talks about another girlfriend and a documentary that he intends to make with a television crew about a Hungarian who has lived his entire life in a psychiatric hospital in inner Russia, unaware that World War II has ended.
However, it also tells the story of his maternal grandfather, George Zourabichvili, who fled to France after Georgia’s failed independence. A cultured and bourgeois man, who in France could not give stability to his family. During the Nazi occupation, he worked for the Germans as a translator.
Outside the novel, in real life, Emmanuel’s mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, died last week. She was a historian of the highest prestige in France. She is the author of a canonical biography of Lenin. She also awarded in Spain. Permanent secretary of the Académie Française. An exquisite woman, of whom noble and distant Russian ancestors were known, but she never spoke of her childhood: hard, sad, shameful. With the triumph of the resistance, her father was arrested. The family never heard from him again.
In the novel, the mother does not want the son to narrate this family chapter. But the writer cannot contain himself, he needs to travel to the bottom. He wants to assess how his grandfather’s story has shaped his life.
Although it is not so much about grandfather as about himself that he wants to talk about: “I spend most of my time in my inner world, which has tired me, and in which I feel like a prisoner. I wish I could get out of that jail, but I can’t. Because? (…) Because deep down I like it”.
Here is an exact definition of narcissism, the most widespread behavior of our time.
