How Emmanuel Carrère Reinvented Nonfiction

What a fine, sensitive piece.

Just change 'discretely' to 'discreetly' in the section on the Musée Jacquemart-André.

I have never read anything by Carrere, but this essay, more than any other book review that I can remember, makes me determined to read the books it describes.

You folks over-indulge your graphics department. The hed on this story was so creative---that is, almost invisible---that I bet a lot of people completely overlooked this article.

I so often feel that people who are depressed are missing something, which is to immerse themselves in the development of a child, or of children. So often great artists fall into depression-- the vacuum which appears when they are not working. And yet so many, like Carrere, never speak of children and what profound meaning their developing lives offer to those of us who are stuck in the long, static years of adulthood.

I read Un Roman russe when it first came out in 2007, as it had attracted a lot of critical attention. I found it to be totally undisciplined and obnoxiously self-indulgent. Has he really gotten better since then?

How CAN you write Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France ´s greatest living writer of fiction ? Who told you that ? ONe of the best sellers but not of the greatest. Do you know Evhenoz, Michon, Bergougnioux, de Kerangal, and others ?

"Lives other than my own" is a masterpiece. The way Carrère talks about his inability to be at peace with himself, to find happiness is both heart wrenching and funny. Later, he is taught about love and altruism by the very people he chooses to write about and his characters stay with you for ever.
I so admire how he can take you into people's lives and talk to you about them with such respect, admiration and tenderness in part because their ability to live, to work, to love is foreign to him.
I have given away this gem of a book many many times, very much like I gave away Joan Didion's "The Year of magical thinking"
Enjoy! you are in for a real treat.

Indeed the writer was "captured" by Carrere into making him one of the best French writers of nonfiction. My opinion is based on the reading of The Kingdom, which I found to be one of the most artificial and arrogant books I have read. He makes himself the hero of the story by putting himself at the same of Christ, Saint Paul and Saint Luke and spending more than half of the book on himself, describing absolutely irrelevant aspects of his life, like the search for a nanny in Paris and the writing of his (obscure) book on Phillip K. Dick. He did very little research on the birth of Christianity, basing most of his opinions on a relatively unknown, salacious, book on Christianity written 19th century. He is so arrogant as to tell us what was Saint Luke thinking and why the Magnificat is an invention and so offensive as to claim that the Virgin Mary masturbated herself. How does he know? Any evidence, even indirect? His evidence seems to come from his admitted love of masturbating while watching pornographic movies.
It is not that he "reinvented nonfiction.....”, "blends personal history, reportage, philosophy and theology" as the author says, but that he produces a hodge-podge of anything that comes to his mind. It is an insult to the reader’s intelligence. I doubt that the author of the article read Carrere’s books. If you can read Spanish or Italian, see my extensive review of El Reino in Amazon.com and Il Regno in Amazon.it

I wish that the article talked a bit about the stylistic choices the translator made when translating Emmanuel Carrere’s books into English. The article picked my interest, and I checked "The Kingdom" (amazon) and "Le Royaume" (amazon.fr) pages to decide which language I should choose to read him. I used "look inside" option and happened to compare the first paragraph on the page "Prologue (Paris, 2011)" which was available on both languages, and I was surprised by the choices the translator made. For example: 1) “Supposons que cette chose impossible arrive pour de bon, que passerait-il? " became “What would happen if this impossible event really did take place?” I would have instead translated it: "if we assume this impossible event takes place for good, what would happen then?”) 2) “quels gestes ferriez-vous” became “what would you do with your hands” instead of “what hand gestures would you do?”, and 3) “quelles paroles prononceriez-vous” became “what would you say” instead of “Which words would you utter?” Just based on this paragraph alone, if I am not mistaken, it seems that during the translation some nuances were lost.

I've been reading him for years, clearly one of the best current novelists/writers. There aren't many around in France. The novels of Richard Millet, particularly the four "Siom" novels (1955-2003) are wonderful as well. I'd also include the early novels of Pierre Bergounioux. Whom am I leaving out? Can't *bear* Houellebecq.
I'm surprised by the negative comments here.

I was surprised by the omission of any reference to Carrère’s "I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick".

The New York Times Magazine, including its contributing writer Wyatt Mason, consistently publishes admiring profiles of the prominent writers whose work I most dislike. Carrère is one of them.

His work isn't so much sincere as it is an affectation of sincerity, and in this the "Confessions" it most closely recalls are Rousseau's. For the rest, it's not just that what Carrère does "sounds narcissistic," as even Mason acknowledges, but that it *is* narcissistic, and profoundly so, which even a cursory viewing of "Retour à Kotelnitsch," the documentary mentioned in this profile, will make fully clear to anyone with a measure of discernment.

I sometimes wish I weren't so thoroughly out of step with the literary tastemakers in NYC, but by promoting writers like Carrère they make it awfully hard to share their enthusiasm.

One can't help but think that Carrère's spiritual and psychological crisis that became his bestseller The Kingdom was, if not invented, then prolonged, by the author in order to write a good book.

It is the national sport of France to have these struggles with Catholicism and then to write about it; Carrère situates himself in this tradition of spiritual and existential doubt that goes back to, oh let''s say, Descartes, becoming "I publish therefore I am."

But what betrays the intellectual and spiritual limits of these struggles is how they are all confined to a tempest in the teapot of Christianity. When Americans have spiritual crises, we convert to Islam or go to India or follow Zen. When the French have these spiritual crises, they always go back home, to the comforts of the Catholicism of the class to which they were born.

I say "comforts" because Catholicism provides a ready-made body of scholarship in French and in Latin and in Greek that someone of Carrère's typical social and educational background could easily delve into for source material to write about.

I would be more convinced of Carrère's spiritual crisis if it had propelled him to learn Sanskrit or Arabic or Chinese and delved into these what would be for him totally foreign bodies of sources in order to confront the issues of god and truth and being.

For the past two years, after stumbling upon his Paris Review interview, I devoured Carrere's nonfiction books (including the Philip K. Dick one that many watchers of Amazon's "High Castle" might enjoy).

I don't know how to describe what makes his work so compelling, but I have not been this excited by an author as an adult. I have given away my copies of his books only to want to buy them again when the urge arises to reread them. The honestness with which he describes life, his own struggles as a person and an artist, and the level of craft and art in his books—I only wish I could read them in French!

This recommendation could not be more timely. I recently read The Adversary, and just started his Life as a Russian Novel.

I have to say I have never read Carrère but I am keen now to search him out. The line about rubbing the cherry table with oil, that "it glows with inner light" is lovely. Will I be the only reader who views the scene about the motor scooter as one in which the writer seeks to replicate Carrère's method of bringing himself into the story?

Thanks for bringing Emmanuel Carrere to the attention of your readers. L'adversaire is one of my favorite works of non-fiction; it takes the French specialty of the fait divers to sinister perfection. Sometimes Carrere writes dismissively, in a casual, offhand way, about middle-aged women; and I look forward to discovering his handling of the English woman who loses her companion in the tsunami.

People and individuals are being drowned in words by writers compelled to write. If writings and reading do not make others realize insufficiency of words in conveying the deeper truth, then such writings and writers have failed. The detritus of such failure is being left on the shores of the western societies everywhere….
Christianity is not all about the proximity to the poorest thing in the world without and within, it is not about making claims on the world within and without. And the rituals like washing of the feet is a reminder of the futility of asserting any claims on the world.