Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Guardian (London) A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia\'s most controversial figures This is how Emmanuel Carr re, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: Limonov is not a fictional character.
But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality, that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal..
Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque.
This pseudobiography isn\'t a novel, but it reads like one: from Limonov\'s grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia\'s literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York, then to Paris; to his return to the motherland.
So Eduard Limonov isn\'t fictional-but he might as well be.
Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about all our history since the end of the Second World War.
It is also, I believe, a life that says something.
It\'s a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: a real adventure novel.
He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter.
He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire\'s butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes.
I know him.
There.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Guardian (London) A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia\'s most controversial figures This is how Emmanuel Carr re, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: Limonov is not a fictional character
