The lives of Limonov

"Limonov", by Emmanuel Carrère, is a great book, one of those which, once opened, immediately stands out from the pile and demands to be read. It tells the true story of Limonov, writer and soviet exile, who hanged out with Richard Hell at CBGB's and Rodovan Karadic in Pale, and is now the leader of the National Bolshevik party and a self styled hero for Russian youth. A pure non-conformist type, a bit of a "provocateur", his life led him from the Moscow underground under Brejnev, to New York and Paris, where, hungry for recognition, he achieved a kind of fame as the author of a series of autobiographical books depicting his (mis)adventures in appalling detail ("Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres"," Journal d'un raté" etc). His life — or rather his lives — are wonderfully told by Emmanuel Carrére, himself a kind of russian expert by default, being the son of the famous sovietologist Helene Carrere d'Encause, now in the Académie Française. It is a strange, oblique, moving and funny morality tale about the Soviet Union and the West.

1Q84

In the past, movies were shot like novels. Now, novels are written like movies. The language of cinema has infiltrated literature. Novels are becoming more visual, less psychological. Characters act in discrete scenes, rather than think or feel in a great continuum. Plot is more important than style. I have just finished the 925 pages of 1Q84, the first book by Murakami I have ever read and I feel like I went to a movie — well maybe a movie and a couple of sequels. I cannot really explain why I finished the novel — it did not seem to me great or unputdownable. Somehow, though, the story draws you in and so does the style — as he himself says, deceptively simple. It felt like a kind of pop literature of a high order.