LLING BREAKDOWN
at a retreat in rural France. This
changed when the bouts of depression
from which he had long suffered
turned into something more serious —
and he was found to be bipolar and
confined to hospital.
“It’s disturbing, at almost 60 years of
age, to be diagnosed with an illness that
you’ve suffered from your whole life
without it ever being named,” he
writes. The book turned into some-
thing much broader, covering his ill-
ness and how he went on to recover
from it by working with Middle Eastern
refugees on the Greek island of Leros.
Another twist in the plot cameCHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE WEEKNICOLETTE JONES
Escape to the River Sea
by Emma Carroll
Macmillan £12.99, age 7-11It would have been easy to
dislike this book for treading
on the heels of the great
Eva Ibbotson’s classic novel
Journey to the River Sea,
which is so much loved.
But within a page or two it
invites forgiveness. Its lively,
skilled storytelling evokes
something of Eva’s spirit. It
does not try to revise the
original’s air-punchingly
satisfying ending, and the
shoutline “inspired by” is an
accurate representation of
the relationship between
this and the original. It
moves on a generation and
cleverly takes as its heroine
a girl whose life echoes
Ibbotson’s: she is a refugee
from wartime Vienna,
leaving horrors behind
her. Neat allusions and
grown-up characters take
us back to Maia’s 1910
adventure up the Amazon.
Even if this homage does
not quite reach the
wit and emotion of its
inspiration, its heart is in
roughly the same place
Ibbotson left hers.WATCH OUT FOR
Be Wild, Little One
by Olivia Hope and
Daniel Egnéus
Bloomsbury £6.99, age 2-6A poem encouraging a life
of daring and adventure in
tune with nature, illustrated
with exuberance and
imagination to make a
magical, richly colourful
picture book that was
admired by Shirley Hughes.The
Adversary
“A savagely
intense and
utterly
compelling
investigation” was
how we described this
2001 account of
Jean-Claude Romand’s
notorious murders in
1993 of his parents, wife
and two children.Limonov
Fiction and
non-fiction
combine
mesmerically
in this
shape-shifting account
of the extraordinary
Russian writer, gangster,
self-mythologiser and
nationalist hoodlum
Eduard Limonov.The
Kingdom
A trans-genre
account of
Carrère’s loss
of faith that
morphs into a retelling
of the story of early
Christianity. “Thrilling,
magnificent and
strange,” said Bryan
Appleyard.I Am Alive
and You Are
Dead
A life of the
science-
fiction writer
Philip K Dick.WHAT TO READ
Binoche stars as a journalist who goes
undercover with the cleaners on a
cross-Channel ferry.
Carrère’s style, best described as
narrative non-fiction, is characterised
by a tendency to write himself into
many of his works, in what some critics
have labelled narcissism. He sees it
more as humility and as an admission
that he is merely describing things as
he sees them. “I don’t believe in objec-
tivity,” he tells me.
The first person is, in any case, the
obvious form for his latest work, which
was initially intended to be “an upbeat
subtle little book” about learning yogacourtesy of Devynck, whom he
divorced shortly before the book came
out. During their 15 years together she
had featured in many of his works, but
now wanted such appearances to stop
— so much so that she had a right of
veto over them enshrined in the agree-
ment terminating their marriage. Her
intervention leaked as Yoga came out,
prompting the French literary scandal
of autumn 2020.
“This story, presented as auto-
biographical, is false, arranged to serve
the image of the author and totally for-
eign to what my family and I went
through alongside him,” she wrote in
Vanity Fair.
Carrère does not deny that, as with
all his works, he has mixed a little fic-
tion with his facts to make a better
story. About 5 per cent of the book is
not true, he says, but as he makes this
clear in the text, the work can still be
considered non-fiction.
So are he and his ex-wife on better
terms now? They have a 15-year-old
daughter, who divides her time
between them, “so we talk about her”,
Carrère says, but he and Devynck are
“not very close”.
Carrère’s life, and writing career,
have in the meantime continued to
move in unexpected directions. Febru-
ary 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine,
found him en route to Moscow. He was
going there to play a cameo role in a
film of his 2011 book on Eduard
Limonov, a colourful punk dissident
writer turned “national Bolshevik” —
and stayed on to write about how
Muscovites viewed the war. Russia runs
in the family: his mother, Hélène
Carrère d’Encausse, Georgian by
origin, is a leading historian of the for-
mer Soviet world (and heads the Aca-
démie Française, the guardian of the
French language).
Carrère’s latest project is something
very different again: he has been
writing a weekly column for L’ O b s
magazine about the mega-trial of the
perpetrators of the November 2015
Islamist attacks on Paris, in which 130
people and seven of the attackers died.
Since last September, when proceed-
ings began, he has spent most after-
noons listening to evidence at the
Palais de Justice. “Even when it is
boring it is interesting,” he says, but
“after nine months of this we all want
to go on holiday”.
As for his health, he is taking the
lithium prescribed to smooth out the
highs and lows in his mood. He feels
fine, but is taking nothing for granted,
he says. “It doesn’t mean it won’t
happen again if you are subject to that
kind of thing.” c
5 June 2022 21