Since the publication of “The Adversary” (2000), the Frenchman Emmanuel Carrère has established himself as one of the main authors of non-fiction novels on a global level. In this work, applauded and acclaimed, the writer gets personally involved and narrates in a chilling way the story of Jean-Claude Romand, who killed his wife, his children, his parents and tried – unsuccessfully – to commit suicide, after 18 years of having deceived his family and friends into believing he was a doctor from the World Health Organization.
In his next work, “A Russian Novel” (2007), Carrère approaches the story of his maternal grandfather, of Georgian-Russian origin, who after a life of exile mysteriously disappeared in the fall of 1944 and, most likely, was executed for acts of collaboration with the Nazis. This book distanced him from his mother for more than a year, since it was a taboo subject that had strictly been kept within family privacy.
His mother is not a minor character. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was a prominent historian, recognized as one of Europe’s leading specialists in the study of Russian history. She was a member of the French Academy, of which she was named “perpetual secretary” until her recent death last year. We will come back to this.
At the same time, in “A Russian Novel,” Carrére, divorced from his first marriage, tells us about his relationship with Sophie, a woman whom he classifies as being of a different class than his own. Without fear of being pedantic, he exposes derogatory comments about her partner and, to finish undermining the relationship, publishes an erotic story about her in a newspaper.
His next work, “Of other people’s lives” (2009), shows us an author who is more stable and reconciled with himself after having entered into a second marriage, this time with the journalist Hélène Devynck. An important part of this novel focuses on Juliette, Hélène’s sister and dedicated judge, who has been diagnosed with a second cancer. Finally, the woman dies, leaving three young daughters and a heartbroken husband.
The book “Yoga” (2020) shows us Carrère immersed in the darkness of darkness. Separated from Hélène Devynck, he tells us about his fall into a deep moral and emotional disgrace: he incriminates himself for his actions during their married life and recognizes that he ruined what was a happy life. With a great level of detail, in a stark way, the writer describes the horrible coexistence with his inner demons and, after suffering two deep depressions, he falls into psychiatric treatment with a diagnosis of bipolarity, in addition to a four-month hospitalization that included treatments with ketamine. and even electroshocks.
Undoubtedly, Emmanuel Carrère has published other books of very high value (“Limonov”, “The Kingdom”, “V13”), but in this column we are touching those that touch his most intimate and familiar fibers.
Let’s go back to your mother. She was born in Paris in 1929 with the name Hélène Zourabichvili, daughter of Georgian-Russian and German-Russian immigrants. According to Emmanuel Carrère, during her childhood she spoke Russian at home and when she went out she did not understand French.
She married the insurance businessman Louis Édouard Carrère d’Encausse in 1952, and since then that was the surname she used. Her academic career was brilliant and ascending, specializing in Russian history (she predicted the end of the USSR). Among other achievements, she was an academic at universities in North America and Japan, as well as holding an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal and the Catholic University of Louvain. She received the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in May 2023.
This daughter of immigrants rose to the top of the intellectual community when she was incorporated into the French Academy in 1990. There she was appointed perpetual secretary (the first woman in this position) in 1999, although she used the non-feminized title of “perpetual secretary.” immediately after his election. One of her most recognized last actions was the promotion of the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa to the Academy. “Vargas Llosa has helped French culture more than many French writers,” she declared.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse died at the age of 94, on August 5 of last year. There is no doubt that her intellectual solvency has had an inestimable influence on her writing son. It is mere speculation, but it should not surprise us that an upcoming book by Emmanuel Carrère addresses precisely the life and work of her mother, as well as her relationship with himself. He already advanced some of that in “A Russian Novel,” and he did so in an outstanding way.
If this prediction comes true, it is to be expected that the French writer will once again dazzle us with an endearing and portentous non-fiction novel: the author himself has confessed that he writes personal experiences “with no room for lies.”