Emmanuel Carrère describing other lives and some part of the contemporary world

D'autres vies que la mienne / Other lives than mine

par Emmanuel Carrère (2009)

This book deals with life and death, illness, extreme poverty, justice et above all love. Everything in it is true.

This could be condensed as "love in extreme conditions" and for once, extreme is not an overstatement since the book opens with the 2004 tsunami. Emmanuel Carrère was on vacation in Sri Lanka at the time, with his family but on a verge of a probable break-up. They skipped the diving lesson for banal reasons; the diving club was destroyed by the wave, most of the coast nearby as well. They found themselves in the middle of extreme and unexpected destruction, scrambled lives, lost relatives and children.

A couple of weeks later, the sister of Carrère's mate was victim of a terrible cancer attack. She was 33 years old with three young girls. Intimate catastrophe after world-scale disaster. Two scales of tragedy hitting the writer with his own unbalanced life, his love uncertainty, his usual despair & sadness. But still a writer : when one of the people involved suggests he could write about the experiences, Carrère starts taking notes, meeting people, trying to capture the situations and understand the people involved.

The book then flows as a succession of striking scenes and fascinating characters, starting in Sri-Lanka, jumping to Vienne in France in a suburban family touched by lethal illness, going then to one-leg judge, to a Consumer Court, to widow drawing comics. Each stage offers deep humane feelings and contemporary elements such as arrogant tourists calling their insurance from a devastated island or working-poor couples struggling to reimburse the large number of loans. The gallery draws an apparently random but accurate picture of the French society, of various common state of minds, various atmosphere; wonderful contemporary book.

The book apparently works as a very classical writer's work: describing what you see, listening to people, documenting yourself on some aspects. Some people might even consider it close to a simple report: no real plot, no real work of imagination, just telling things and people as they happen or explain themselves. But the structure of the book instantly shows a more complex work by Emmanuel Carrère. During the two third of the book, the situations seem to shift at every other chapters: Sri Lanka, then the story of a couple who lost their daughter, then the sister-in-law suffering from cancer, then the story of a colleague from the dying woman, then description of the Consumer Court and the way it works... Every situation brings new people who seem apparently side-characters at first, but receive more focus on the following pages, offering new themes and ideas. Like some kind of branching tree, offering new ideas and paths to explore, deep exploration of every aspect worth telling.

It made me think of the old suggestion by Jean-Luc Godard for a the tennis tournament in Rolland Garros. Start filming any player in the first round, then focus on the winner on the second round. Getting a shape of the big picture and the tournament spirit by remaining close to successive individuals.

Emmanuel Carrère offers an impressive patchwork feel to his text, a wide variety, while remaining consistent to the general tone of the project. A deep modern approach : reaching truth and authenticity by remaining close to small elements, by giving space to topics of apparently different value, the current struggle on jurisprudence of individual loans as detailed as the life of the recently-widowed brother-in-law. The approach is not that different from the one in his previous book, "Un roman russe" ("Life as in a russian novel"), where old family history was unravelled next a notes about a work-in-progress movie or a painful break-up. In both cases, Carrère is the link, the presence behind the pen or the keyboard, letting his feelings flow along the paragraphs, his personal life. Some kind of open life philosophy, trying to understand himself and understand the others and the world, looking for a consistent understanding of self.