EBOOK
Limonov
The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in Fr
Emmanuel Carrère4
(1)
About
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 subject: "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 post-communism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. It's a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: 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 one: 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 counter narrative 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.
This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "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 post-communism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. It's a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: 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 one: 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 counter narrative 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.
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Reviews
"Like this maddening, electrifying book--equal parts biography, adventure yarn, and ode--the Russian writer and sometime political agitator Eduard Limonov is a shape-shifter. Born in 1943, he has been a foundry worker and a poet in the U.S.S.R.; a bum and a butler in New York; a literary star in Paris; a fighter in the Balkans; the leader of an ultra-nationalist party in Moscow. Carrère recognizes the risk of being seduced by his subject's outsize life and macho self-mythologizing. 'There were times when I hated Limonov,' he confesses, but he is drawn to Limonov's determination to be 'a hero, a truly great man.' Carrère's prose has a brash punk energy; his refusal to flatten Limonov with easy judgment gives the book its life."
The New Yorker
"For those of us who didn't grow up passing around copies of Limonov's 'fictional memoir,' It's Me, Eddie, we have Emmanuel Carrère . . . and his jaunty, raunchy Limonov, which the publisher calls a pseudobiography, to fill in the colorful outlines of the old eccentric's life . . . There's something very Russian about the Eddie that Carrère gives us, a man who laughs at life before it has a chance to bring him low, who masters it by exalting himself above all others. He is the antihero we came to know ages ago, in "Eugene Onegin" and "A Hero of Our Time," but this scoundrel is so much better at relishing his life, so much better at entertaining his reader. Carrère, like Limonov, knows exactly what we want."
Julia Ioffe, The New York Times Book Review
"Years ago, I read a 'fictional memoir', It's Me, Eddie, by Edward Limonov. The story of this wild Russian, who returned from the west to lead the Bolsheviks, has been updated and explored in all its telling uncertainties in Limonov by the ever inventive Emmanuel Carrère."
Geoff Dyer, The Guardian