A Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrere review

This is an intriguing and playful novel by the French author and director Emmanuel Carrere, which is semi-autobiographical. An assignment to film a documentary about a recently discovered Hungarian prisoner of war still living in confused circumstances in Russia leads Carrere to confront the mystery surrounding the disappearance of his own Russian grandfather in 1944, who was presumably shot after being accused of being a collaborator. The institution in which the Hungarian POW lived is in the small Russian town of Kotelnich, a place that been bypassed by modernity in more ways than one. Despite its deprivation, Carrere becomes obsessed by Kotelnich, not least because his great-grand-uncle, Count Victor Komarovsky, was vice-governor of the region in pre-Soviet times. Such is his interest in the place, that he proposes that his film crew return there with a vague idea of capturing what everyday life there is like. On the lookout for local characters, the film crew encounter the local FSB agent and his entrancing French speaking girlfriend. Things are just as complicated back home, as his mother is quite resistant to Carrere’s exploration of what happened to her father, which she regards as her story rather than history. Meanwhile, Carrere has a rocky relationship with a younger woman which culminates in his composition of a real-time erotic love story for Le Monde… As this erotic story proves, Carrere is a writer of real talent, with a powerful imagination well served by fiendish devices. However, Carrere, like any other character in this novel, is not in charge of his own destiny, and the book also details the most wretched and squalid murder… Although (thankfully) shorter than most classic Russian novels, Emmanuel Carrere’s creation is just as powerful and thought-provoking.