Limonov - Tapa dura

He's the best kind of writer, not just a bestseller but a man who is not afraid to leave the comfort zone of his desk, go out into the world, take risks, and get his shoes dirty ... His "non-fiction novel", Limonov, has two explicit modes - part adventure story, part cultural-historical analysis ... it is about Carrère's exploration of himself, his Russian heritage, and what it means to be a European after the second world war, especially since the end of the cold war (Robert McCrum Observer)

To risk a rather devalued word, stunning (John Updike The New Yorker)

A beguiling writer . . . Graceful and important (John Freeman NPR)

Russia, they say, cannot be understood with the mind alone, and neither can her looniest son to date, Edichka Limonov. It also takes a heart, a spleen, a liver and this beautiful book by France's greatest writer, Emmanuel Carrère. Get ready for the last real adventure of the 20th Century! (Gary Shteyngart (author of Little Failure))

In this lucid, rigorous, deeply researched novelistic biography, Carrère reveals a multifaceted, unconventional, and fascinating anti-hero to the reader ... Limonov is as much a mystery as Russia itself, that complex, violent, desperate country that Carrère reconstructs in a powerful historical sketch (Bendetta Marietti La Repubblica)

With Limonov, Emmanuel Carrère abandons fiction without giving up on magic ... The author is present as narrator, and so Emmanuel Carrère himself becomes a character in this book. It was the American Tom Wolfe, at the beginning of the sixties, who coined the term 'new journalism' for methods not altogether new. With In Cold Blood, Truman Capote proved himself a master of the genre. And Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov proves he is too. You read this all in one breath (Bernardo Valli La Repubblica)

Carrère covers a lot of ground with cool honesty and careful humanity (Sally Singer The New York Times (A Favorite Book of the Year))

An experimental combination: part politico-historical exegesis of half a century - and more - of Russian history, part modern and compelling adventure novel. Limonov is the portrait of a Soviet, then Russian, man at once exceptional and deplorable; it's the story of some potential outcomes in the clash between history and the individual, of the effects that a century of totalitarian ideals have wrought on the human body ... Carrère doesn't hide even before the most troubling episodes ... he suspends judgment, takes a step back, begins again. We want to understand, with him, now that we're reading this faithful and precise account of one of Russia's dissident delinquents of the recent past, what these lives that are not our own are like (Michele de Mieri Il sole 24 ore)

There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrère is one of them (Paris Review)

This is an extraordinary, fantastic book about an extraordinary, fantastic life. It's billed as a novel, can be read as a novel and would be a good novel if Eduard Limonov had never existed. But he does . . . you will learn an awful lot about Russia now and in the days of the Soviets (Allan Massie The Scotsman)