his definitive novel about his mother’s love and cruelty

But according to the French writer, there was more: In the background, his mother despised his workAn academic proud of her scientific method, she did not really approve of the use of the first person (“for it was the beginning of apoltronamienta”) or the way she approached matters of Russia. To that banished woman, says the writer, “there is no grace that is on earth to arm my fools for ever.” If of course you link to your documents like the one from Kotelnich; in Limonov, a Russian novel.

Mother de Carrère was hija of Russian princes and Georgian aristocrats. She was related to the lady-in-waiting of the last emperor, at least with a relapse, and to a Prussian general; the first woman, Salomé Zurabishvili, was the first woman in Georgia.

The entire Carrère family from the mother’s side, through both families, came to France after the revolution. They lost everything, including an estate residence in Tuscany, an ancient Medici estate where they hosted aristocrats from all over Europe during the estates; Cosima Wagner, to give an example, was in the house regularly.

The Von Pelkens, their maternal abuela’s family, learned what so many Russian nobles did—as did the Nabokov family, who accurately depicted this world of Russian exile living “amidst material poverty and intellectual poverty” in novels like The Diva—who, in their version, model terminaban drivers, ellos, losdolas princess, convertidos los condes, convertidos in residence.

Based on her son’s story, Carrère’s abuela taught her six teachers of different nationalities who went to speak to the children on Mondays in Germany, Tuesdays in Russia, miracles in Italian, games in English, Christmas in France and Saturdays en español (el domingo libraban)”.

In the light this puts on her mind, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse appears as a sophisticated product of all things. Stricta, even in love; industrious, intelligent, cruel; inflexible on moral issues, ultra-derechist in rats, one of the last Putinists of the West (at the last moment he denied the possibility of invading Ukraine in writing, on TV, on the radio: “Putin is a person who depends on reason”; later he said significantly: “This Senor Zelenski is very arrogant”), admirer of Barsillaqfasqbec and admirer of Brasschéll Carrère, while his mother died, you kept asking for notes.

At a certain moment, he recognizes in this inhuman gesture of a great writer the power to write a book, striving for the effects that this or that desire can have in it. The result generally justifies the effort. After any hagiographical attempt, the writer culminated in Koljoson the last job one of the most beautiful relationships on a mother which were written in recent years.

‘Koljòs’ is one of the most beautiful mother stories written in recent years

Nowadays, we are so used to this type of book that we often forget the imperfections that can be attached to it, all of which are dazzling to look at. And a difficult balance that tends to lose Carrère imitators (It doesn’t matter the case) to get the same results.

Finally, it is logical, they imitate what is at hand, for example, the necessary use of stripes to merge the entire description of materials: in this case, dinner with Sebag Montefiore; the angel smartly got rid of it in light of the “catastrophic consequences” novel I wanted to publish Russian novel in the family; Macron’s “negro” or ghostwriter in his state funeral speech; the concept, the key to the emphasis on history, on the “vertical dimension of life”; the topicality and emotionality of the title, which alludes to a memory from childhood, or a certain more or less calculated exhibitionism.

En Carrère, además, se percieve an honest impulse to reveal the truth the thought that progresses in his investigations, in which he deepens with a dizzying crescendo, is full of tension. But even after these recursions in which he moves, with all the prepared devices that convey the novel to the eye, Carrère demonstrates something that can hardly be imitated: an extraordinary (also rare) alignment of talents: an energetic storyteller on the one hand and a sharp thinker on the other.

And above all, what concerns the content, e.g too smart to catch the ridiculous mistake of pointing to the lineI can neutralize the enjoyment by referring, for example, to the “barrenness” of his mother’s work, or to his futile attempts to rehabilitate the image of the last Tsar, a member of his lost “misma class.”

Carrère recalls the premiere of her grandmother Olga, whom she attended in her “small and bleak” apartment in Issy-les-Moulineaux. She was one of those hundred-year-old princesses who survived the misery of exile without trying to understand why the Bolsheviks came through. During the recording of The October Revolution, which had a vivid image of that little girl, that old one, Carrère emphasized, she said with only “a shadow that instilled sincerity”: “But why did we live so well? Let us all live so well. We did so well…”.

The novel changes like a kind of living organism. In an admirable feat of rigor, Carrére equals all serious men who ever realize they are writers. about the most important book (or at least the one who loves him most intimately): autobiography and family memories, history, travelogue, chronicle, political analysis.

The novel, in its final mutation (in the last fifty pages), was transformed into Honda and led to a meditation on death, until her mother – who was born every morning as Jünger or Thomas Mann – slept on a hard sofa, in Living alone, with two cylindrical pillows for all comfort – fits and dies.

Carrere pen do not be persuaded by the saddest message of the great lady: the cruelty she displayed until the last day with Louis, her husband and father de Carrère, who finally could not stand it. Thanks to this man in love, who during his lifetime amassed an impressive archive of his wife’s noble family, Carrère was able to write this book, which is among the best of his work.