An unpredictable train crash, beyond its French nationality and its translation on the same label (Anagram). Emmanuel Carrere he is one of the media beacons of European literature, and, for many, a true cult author with a decade of great splendor. Between 2000 and 2011, he left the path of an erratic and remarkable fiction career to enter another where, as the title of one of his books says, he would interfere in the lives of others, from that of Jean-Claude Romand in ‘The adversary’ even Eduard’s ‘Lemon’. With the first he knew how to find a valid vein to experiment with, while the last one was its summit, perhaps for getting rid of its textual omnipresence to give it to its protagonist.
Catherine millet it enjoys all the praise of artistic criticism. In 2001 his ‘The Sex Life of Catherine M.’ sold millions of copies from the morbidity to read some confessions branded as a manifesto of feminist liberation or cheap pornography according to the taste and ideology of the consumer. The easiest way before this volume is the second alternative, but if the narrator’s trajectory is known, the narrator cannot be analyzed from a single layer.
After ‘Limonov’, Carrère gave another twist to his manual, almost wallowing in the worship of his navel. ‘The kingdom’ He narrated his vicissitudes with the Catholic religion, with Saint Paul as the second and imposing protagonist. In the memory the egotism of the BoBO predominates, Parisian bourgeois-bohemian, yes, enchanted with his friends, the slides of existence, his daily anecdotes where he does not hide, nor does he want to do so, his economic slack and the inevitable, pure brand name, happy and hopeful ending. The difference with his previous production was that preponderance of the self.
‘Yoga’, his new novel available in Spain from February 24, thus raises the question of whether his egotism will increase to a superlative degree or will he return to his previous role as an observer with very subjective interventions more or less punctual. With Catherine Millet the mystery was to intuit the content of her also new ‘Loving Lawrence’ (in bookstores since the end of January. Her exhibitionist past goes back here to a first person present by associating fragments of the British with her own experiences; there is hoarding and we notice a firm voice when directing his theses. At the end of a chapter he reflects on displacement and concludes that in literature, it is the demonstration that writing consists of saying everything, deliberately or not.
Dissatisfactions
At the end of 2014 Emmanuel Carrère was excited to dedicate his next book to yoga. He had been a practitioner for decades, he cared about deepening the subject and the subject was linked from the contrast with ‘The Kingdom’. He signed up for an intensive ten-day retreat, abandoning him on the fourth after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, or rather for the murder of Bernard Maris, a close friend of his. He spoke a few words at the funeral, continued with his upper-class routine, and suddenly fell into a deep depression, his family admitted him to a specialized clinic, where he was subjected to electroshock therapy.
Carrère fell into a deep depression and was subjected to electroshock therapy
In this well-being between spiritual and paradisiac, with too many carefree and brutal indulgence in stripping a whole row of vanities, a collapse occurs and something stuns us due to an inexplicable emptiness, a void more clamorous if possible due to Carrère’s demand to tell everything. Here, he whispers, he does it too, but he can’t tell the whole truth. The prose conveys a man adrift. When it is installed we do not understand it, especially if we pay attention to the constants of French, picky to the point of detail.
Millet dives into D.H. Lawrence from an oscillating contact between reverence and fear. Reverence for having his novels on the shelves, fear of running into a mirror when opening them. The immersion will be gradual, spilling over the work table for two years. ‘Loving Lawrence’ is smooth, careful and forceful. It is not a false biography, but rather the dissection of an empathy through the recovery of a very modern legacy, here wielded from feminism, without gratuity because the relationships, suggestions and theories of the author of ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover are associated ‘through his biographical and literary journey.
DH Lawrence was the son of miners and had the great luck to fall in love with Frida Weekley, née von Richtoffen, with whom he lived for more than eighteen years on a journey around the planet. She was an uncomplexed woman, without adhering to the established parameters. The heroines of his partner drank from his character, on the run to continue on their way, iconoclasts by not hiding their infidelities and wise to accept normality, transgressing it.
Lawrence is portrayed as an exceptional psychologist of the feminine. His pornographic sambenito – ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover’ had parts seized until the early sixties of the last century – emerges from the explicit in the descriptions. The hegemony of pleasure, or the process of obtaining it, dwarfs its elegance by glossing over subsequent physical and mental dissatisfaction. In his time he broke barriers to sweep away the kitsch dictated by the convention. In the XXI century, protected by that of perspective, only the most prissy will be offended by the rigor of the sexual act. What is interesting is what follows, the lean of discomfort after the ecstasy, not so much from the moral point of view, but from the social point of view and the situation of women within the capitalist chain. Lawrence, unique in his lyricism towards the landscape, detested the industrialization of the country, the loss of purity and the short circuit for those who had memories of another time. Who knows if his wandering through Europe, Asia and America was an attempt to rediscover that mythical moment.
Millete portrays Lawrence as an exceptional psychologist of the feminine
Carrère says goodbye to his depression and travels to the Greek islands to recover. As he gets bored, he jumps to Leros, getting involved with a small group of refugees, students of creative writing classes for teenagers. The four kids have so much energy as if to nullify the narrator for fifty extraordinary pages, brimming with history with capital letters from minimal angles. They are a parenthesis. Before and after, the tonic is more nourished by musings about its own worth, and the sufficiency of being among the prestigious writers, or linear ephemeris with the chronology, among them a night of seduction with cinematographic overtones on Sunday afternoon.
Carrère ignores it, but he is a puritan like Lawrence, who nevertheless held that condition from a beneficial perspective because of his belief in a space without so many regulations or speeds due to the extinction of the rural, authentic because the origin had not been disfigured. The men and women in his novels abide by these norms and shun the stipulations with tiny, highly enlightening gestures. Carrère, on the other hand, suffers from a crisis tinged with a poem quoted by Millet. Baudelaire in ‘My Naked Heart’ says “Fucking is aspiring to enter into another, / and the artist never leaves himself.” The self-absorption of ‘Yoga’ does not play with that Indian fusion. It is the icing on the cake for an egotrip plunged into chaos and without any self-criticism.
Omissions
What is narrated in ‘Yoga’ is banal, being saved because Carrère is a character in himself and his followers appreciate that soap opera in volume, even if it is out of mere curiosity to see how it ends. It would be wonderful to move to the brain of a novice in these conflicts and witness a certain stupor at that waste of narcissism, spiced by the arrogance of a status.
In Leros Càrrere he wants to give a mobile phone to one of the teenagers. The fragment retains some similarity to a sequence from ‘L’eclisse’, from Michelangelo Antonioni. As they pull a drowned man out of a car, Alain Delon regrets the damage to the vehicle. For the author of ‘Yoga’ giving the boy the phone is almost an act of Christian charity. It stays on the facade without penetrating further. The inability to understand the other is total and absolute, staining the whole plot by this defect. Do you have an explanation? If we are strict, the answer would be negative. Carrère’s divorce ruined ‘Yoga’ by including a document where she promised not to mention her ex-spouse in her next books. This sentimental break was the supporting column of the architecture of the narrative building, frivolous instead of emotional.
Carrère’s divorce ruined ‘Yoga’ by vowing not to talk about her ex-spouse
Millet distances himself from his rival in this fight by rejecting the imposture. Carrère, perhaps to heal himself, insinuates having lied. She don’t need it because his goal is to approach Lawrence in a kaleidoscopic way. He writes as if he were right without wanting to impose it, and he does so with his self committed to a collective bet. Lawrence is a precursor of the liberation of women, an androgynous soul for apprehending them as if he were one of them, whose message has been masked from the four topics of curse.
The selfless erudition of Millet, a self-taught expert, is the antipode of his opponent’s claim. ‘Loving Lawrence’ is a declaration of love with ecumenical aspiration, especially when feminism is on all the agendas of today. ‘Yoga’ is an egomaniacal overdose, a multilateral descent into hell. Who was going to tell us that the harmony was ‘Limonov’.
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