Deep into this novel-ish memoir, or memoiristic novel, which was supposed to be an “upbeat, subtle little book on yoga”, Emmanuel Carrère pronounces that “you gain nothing by forgetting yourself”. It’s a line that would perfectly suit the kind of inspirational text he intended, but has completely failed, to write. Instead the words have a different resonance, following as they do descriptions of grief, mental illness, hospitalisation and a moving personal account of the migrant crisis. They have an extra significance for those who have read any of Carrère’s previous experiments in hybridity: The Adversary, My Life as a Russian Novel, Other Lives But Mine, Limonov, and The Kingdom – books that have made him one of the most notable authors in France today. One of the things we learn from these “non-fiction novels”, as Carrère prefers to call them, is that he is not a writer ever in danger of forgetting himself.
In the 1980s and 1990s Carrère mostly wrote novels. With The Adversary (2000), a riveting account of a quintuple murder and a life constructed of lies, he pivoted to non-fiction texts in which he is the main or at least a major character, a chatty, self-deprecating narcissist, explaining how the book we are reading came into existence. Hence the repeated notification, in this latest transmission from Planet Carrère, that it was going to be an “upbeat, subtle little book on yoga” before the world intruded and sent it in a different direction. Such are the risks when you write from life – although the extent to which Carrère’s work is true to life, particularly here, is a vexed question.
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