Unread books

It's always a good time to read any book by Emmanuel Carrère, even if it's 14 years late. Carrère published his magnificent portrait of the poet (and much else besides) Eduard Limonov in 2011, and now Anagrama, which already published it in Spanish in 2012 with a translation by Jaime Zulaika, is publishing the Catalan translation by Ferran Ràfols Gesa. It's a magnificent book that follows the unlikely biography of the Russian writer Eduard Limonov (1943–2020), a perpetual dissident, naturalized Frenchman, and founder of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party (whose supporters were known as the Nazbols ). Carrère's book oscillates between fictionalized biography and biographical novel, in which the biographer is another character whom we also see evolve throughout his hunt. When, in the early 1990s, Limonov took part in the Balkan conflict, particularly in the Serbian Republic of Krajina, the biographer changed his perspective on the subject of study, halted the project, and considered abandoning it. The text then acts as a distorted mirror reflecting the silhouette of the photographer about to throw the camera into the sea, disgusted by the fascist turn of his protagonist. In the end, it continues until it reaches a long epilogue, dated December 2009, with the biographer searching for a fitting ending for the narcissistic personality of the subject, since he cannot resort to the canonical ending of any biography: Eduard Limonov is still alive.

Emmanuel Carrère writes that no one has read Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel

Like all memorable books, Limonov is a frayed ball of yarn that entices us to pull at any angle. Particularly interesting is the parallel Carrère draws between two dissidents as opposite as Limonov and Solzhenitsyn, who left the country at the same time, in the spring of 1974, and also returned at the same time, twenty years later. While one prostituted himself in Central Park, the other wrote sixteen hours a day on his Vermont estate, The Red Wheel, “a novelistic cycle about the origins of the 1917 revolution that makes War and Peace seem like a superficial psychological narrative in the style of Adolphe .” When the author of The Gulag Archipelago returns, communist nostalgics see him as a criminal, democrats as an ayatollah, and readers only talk about The Red Wheel to mock him. Carrère writes: “They haven't read it, nobody has.” I'm not surprised, because it's nearly six thousand pages long. There is only one complete French translation, published by Fayard between 1983 and 2017, which exceeds Proust's In Search of Lost Time in pages. In Catalan, the longest novel cycle is The Passionate Pilgrim by Joan Puig i Ferreter, published in 12 volumes totaling 5,982 pages. I know two people who have read it in full. Anyone else in the room?