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 postcommunism, 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 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.
Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a writer, scriptwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010 and the Prix des lecteurs de L'Express, the Prix Marie Claire du roman d'émotion, and the Prix Crésus in 2009. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013. He lives in Paris.
John Lambert grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and studied philosophy in Paris before moving to Berlin, where he now lives with his wife and two children. In addition to Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov, he has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean- Philippe Toussaint.
